Bloggers React to Black Friday Trampling Death

by Damozel | Good.  Outrage is what the situation requires.  Outrage and incredulity.

I posted my reaction, Black Black Friday, here.

Larisa Alexandrovna, in a cathartic-for-the-reader outburst of distilled loathing, wrote:

Let's say that you too were insane enough to go shopping at 3 AM, would you not turn around immediately and go home after you saw 2,000 people? Would 500 do it for you? Again, what could be so damn important...that this mass of people gathered?.... Where di the police go?.... Here is what happens when you get a bunch of American shopper's together without supervision - and of course, it would happen at Wal-Mart where everything is from China...where employees are treated like slaves....

Even after these people learned that their actions lead to the murder of a store clerk, they refused to leave the store and wanted to keep shopping. Oh, and as for Wal-Mart?...Sure they closed their doors long enough to get the dead-employee off their pretty floors. But then they re-opened shortly after. What, Wal-Mart could not lose some money from one store where employees were traumatized, where an employee had been killed, where such a thing occurred?....

Even right wingers are shocked and disgusted. At Poligazette, Claudia writes:

I usually find prognostications about the decadence of society to be highly exaggerated and often based on nostalgia for a non-existent idyllic past. However things like this make me reconsider....A man has died today, not because of a stampede to get much needed foodstuffs, or to get sorely needed blankets, but simply to get things. Things for their own sake, just because you can. It was worth breaking into a store, it was worth knocking over a man, it was even worth trampling him to death.

Agitprop:

You’d think that, given what’s going on in Mumbai, people might focus on something other than getting one of those four cheap bigscreen TVs that Wal-Mart uses for bait.  You’d be wrong.... Are you fucking kidding me?...Gee, I wonder if Wal-Mart will pay him through the moment of death, or just clock him out as of the time they put him in the ambulance.

The Mahablog shows a charitable frame of mind that is commendable and made me feel bad about my own response till I remembered that the mob fought to carry on shopping afterward and the store reopened so they could.

I suspect the people near the glass doors did not deliberately break the glass, but were pushed through the glass by the force of the surging crowd behind them. It’s entirely possible that much of the force was coming from people in the back of the crowd who couldn’t see what damage they were doing.

This may be hard to imagine if you’ve never been in a crowd so thick that you were helpless to move except with the crowd, but I have. The physics of the energy of the crowd can be very dangerous, and individuals within the crowd may be helpless to stop whatever is going on. It’s like being caught in a tide.

Admirable---but no.  Here's more about the incident.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said....

Chanting "push the doors in," the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.

Sensing catastrophe, nervous employees formed a human chain inside the entrance to slow down the mass of shoppers.

It didn't work.

The mob barreled in and overwhelmed workers.

"They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door," said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. "Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over."

After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.

Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like "savages." (Daily News)

Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women asks:.

Who needs terrorists when the culture has gone stark raving berserk with greedy capitalism?...

Egalia has a photo of the pre-trampling crowd scene.

The Gun Toting Liberal also wonders:  "[C]ould this fall under one of the many (way, too many) definitions of “domestic terrorism” and if so, who really IS the “terrorist” in this case?

The Impolitic has a different idea.

The 200 or so crazed shoppers literally took the doors off the building in their rush to get that $600 wide screen TV. The store should be held criminally responsible for the deaths for creating the shopping frenzy and failing to provide proper crowd control. Sending a couple of underpaid, overworked stock clerks to hold back the mob is nothing short of negligent homicide.

At The Reaction, Captain Fogg reacts bleakly:

Merry Christmas, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis - and we don't mean you, Wal-Mart shoppers.

We don't mean the commenter on CNN.com either, who wasted no time before blaming it on the Liberals and African Americans who will, no doubt, now that Obama is waiting to go to Washington make this sort of thing commonplace from now on.

Pete Abel is terse. "Get a grip people."  "Seriously. Is there not enough tragedy borne of intentional idiocy this week that we have to create more of it from accidental idiocy?"

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Comments

[Charles]

Good round-up, Damozel.

It is pretty difficult to absorb.