Black Friday Comes But Once A Year

Too much focus has been put on the consumerism surrounding Thanksgiving week in recent years. The holiday is a time for family. For food. For fellowship. For football. No one should have to leave their gathering and go to work at eight in the evening on Thanksgiving just to get ready for a midnight Black Friday sale, unless, of course, that person works at the store selling the sick 72 inch TV I need in my garage.

Doctors work at hospitals on holidays. Pushing logically forward, this means that those in retail should always be available so that we can buy Stuff whenever we want, for without Stuff, we are nothing more than wild animals. Would you like to be a wild animal, living outdoors, biting and scratching and fighting for the scraps of a shredded rabbit carcass, or a human being, shopping inside, biting and scratching and fighting for the scraps at the bottom of a DVD bargain bin? In nature, when that carcass is gone, it’s gone, but on Black Friday, we have people who were forced to abandon their families that will replenish that dumpster full of NCIS DVDs while you push your thumb deep into a fellow Mark Harmon fan’s eye.

Police and paramedics are available every day of the year, too, so why do you think you shouldn’t have to clock in for a twelve-hour overnight shift, Mr. I-don’t-want-to-work-holidays-retail-guy-who-is-being-paid-almost-ten-dollars-an-hour? Just imagine if the police didn’t feel like working on Black Friday. Who would quell the riots that Black Friday causes?

Anyways, the first Thanksgiving was nothing more than a prelude to massive land theft and genocide. Is that what we want to celebrate? Methinks not! Erase the pain and terrible memories of Manifest Destiny by giving your money to a large corporation in the middle of the night! Exercise civility and engage in hand-to-hand combat with your fellow man (preferably of the same race) on the way into Walmart and then pay for the ensuing spoils. Time was, you would’ve given that same man a blanket dosed with smallpox and then turned his ancestral homeland into a tobacco farm. Being a part of Black Friday is being a part of the evolution of mankind.

It’s also one of those neat times where you can go plum wild, and no one can get mad at you.

For instance, on what other day of the year can I drink coffee all night and have seven hours of shopping in before the sun rises? When else is it perfectly acceptable to ram your shopping cart into the nuts of yuppies and vagrants alike, whether they’re stumbling around with a 75 lb. case of upscale dog food, or simply trying to get out of the cold? In June, why is it not OK for me to trample a seven year-old child that is standing where I want to be, but the day after Thanksgiving, people form a circle and cheer me on? On Black Friday, even people in wheelchairs aren’t off-limits, because who’s to say it’s not just a wily disguise to get preferential treatment? How can I be so thankful for what I have on Thanksgiving, but when midnight strikes, my face becomes disfigured, I let out an otherworldly howl, and I become a ravenous beast that needs to buy things that have been available every other day of the year during normal waking hours?

Hell, I don’t know. Probably some instinctual hangover from our Neanderthal days. If only those ancestors could see me now, belittling retail workers, breathing in the sweaty farts of strangers, and replacing the great sadness I feel inside with Stuff.

Thanksgiving

I’m thankful for the Internet.