::black friday, indeed

I don't remember ever venturing out for shopping on "Black Friday."
Some years, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to endure the crowded mayhem, but have decided that I simply do not.

This year, I learned about this, and it deeply wounded me.

I could wax intellectual and/or philosophical and theorize that tragedy occurred because this man was, in a sense, trampled by greed itself.
I could ascend to the haughty summit of a soapbox and conclude that this incident has laid bare the seedy underbelly of American consumerism.
I won't.

But the moment that affected me the most was, when my father was reading aloud a description of the incident, and its last sentence was something akin to "After the incident occurred, most witnesses returned to shopping as if nothing had happened."

I was stabbed by the sadness, but also very soon reminded of how very jaded I am, and remembered that I could very easily have been one of those shoppers who witnessed the atrocity and then simply returned to business as usual.

When we are presented with the searing reality of the worst in ourselves, it's so tempting to flee from it.
How painful it is to be confronted with our own behavior at its most appalling.