Pepperspray, Waffle Makers And Other Black Friday Stupidity

This post is all about the folks who make it hard for me to keep my faith in humanity. Consider it a momentary indulgence where I give thanks that for all my screw ups, I don’t behave like this.

I spend a lot of time in this blog looking at the brighter side of human nature — examples of people rising above the odds and living to the fullest despite the hand they’ve been dealt.

This is not one of those posts.

Really, people — you’re acting like apes throwing feces over a waffle maker.  This is the problem with Black Friday. We spend the day before giving thanks for all the things we have. Then at midnight we go out and resort to greed-driven animal behavior.

I’ll give you this — you’re making me feel pretty good about myself right now. I may struggle with OCD and addictive behavior, I may have trouble expressing my emotions and I may be a bit of a control freak.

But I will never go out at midnight and dive into a quivering mass of angry humanity over a waffle maker.

Damn, I’m thankful.

But the waffle fight wasn’t even the biggest low.

One asshole shot a shopper who wouldn’t relinquish his purchases outside a San Leandro, Calif., Walmart store, leaving the poor guy hospitalized in critical but stable condition.

The Washington Post and the AP report that at another Walmart in a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, a woman trying to get the upper hand to buy cheap electronics unleashed pepper spray on a crowd of shoppers, causing minor injuries to 20 people, police said.

That’s some interesting behavior in a country where much of the population is supposedly out of work and unable to afford the products they’re fighting over.

To be fair, there ARE a lot of people out of work who can’t afford these things. But, fortunately, the majority appear to have more self control than these other Black Friday kooks.

Here’s hoping that yesterday was just a freakish blip on the screen in which the human experience is played out.