Respect Authority

I know I’m more than a few days late on this story, and even though the reality is that I’ve been exceedingly lazy and disinclined to write snarky commentary on the news, let’s pretend it’s because it took me almost an entire week to come to grips with the fact that we live in a world where people actually get trampled by frantic shoppers.

Just in case you live under a rock, or in any equally secluded location where things like “Wal-Mart” and “national news” have yet to rear their ugly heads, the papers have been awash with stories of Jdimytai Damour, the 34-year-old Wal-Mart employee who was literally trampled to death on Black Friday by a hoard of rollback-crazed shoppers.

In a statement this week, Wal-Mart said the company planned to reach out to Damour’s family to “do what we can to help them through this difficult time,” a statement rendered entirely moot by the fact that they’ll have to do something when a lawsuit filed against them by the guy’s family yields a multi-million dollar settlement. Not that any amount of money could negate the absurdity if having to tell friends and relatives that your family member was stomped to death by heartless discount freaks.

The saddest part about this story is that there’s no one to blame. Sure, Wal-Mart is an evil corporation for whom an in-store trampling is but a drop in a much larger bucket of eternal damnation, but you can’t really scapegoat a store for the actions of its patrons. Even if Wal-Mart should have had more than one person holding back the masses, the fact that hundreds of civilians let this happen is enough to make me think a more appropriate punishment would have been burning the store to the ground – with all its would-be Black Friday shoppers still inside.