Friday, November 28, 2008

No Bargain

The New York Daily News reports that a man was trampled to death in the doorway of a Long Island Wal-Mart this morning:

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

Maybe the people who did this will be able to watch the news reports about it later on their new $599 LCD television sets. And did this horrific event cause anyone a second thought?


Before police shut down the store, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the store clerk's life.

"They were working on him, but you could see he was dead, said Halcyon Alexander, 29. "People were still coming through."

Only a few stopped.

"They're savages," said shopper Kimberly Cribbs, 27. "It's sad. It's terrible."

Hard to argue that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the easy reaction is to call those folks savages and bemoan the fact that there are some human beings who have sunk to that level. But this kind of thing happens too often and over to broad an area of space and time to be some aberation. Instead, I think this is normal human behavior when they have no longer been trained in basic human virtues (Godliness). It's an appalling revelation of human nature.

Mr. D said...

Yeah, I agree with that, anonymous. I guess I'd reserve the appellation "savage" to someone who sees a person on the ground like that but still wants to get in the store and get their 1080p. Common decency would dictate that people back off at that point, but common decency is, like common sense, common knowledge and common courtesy, no longer very common.

I certainly remember the Who concert in 1979 and the near tragedy at Camp Randall in the 1990s, so your point about this being human nature is spot on.