Saturday, November 29, 2008

Murdered for a Bargain

Jdimytai Damour was attempting, along with co-workers, to hold together the sliding glass doors that were beginning to bulge and break under the press of eager shoppers as Wal-Mart's opening time neared. This action cost him his life.
The overstrained doors shattered, and a throng of eager shoppers streamed in, knocking Damour and his co-workers to the ground and viciously trampling them. Other workers who tried to help were beaten back by the streaming crowd.
When I read the reports of the New York Times and Associated Press regarding these events, I was horrified. How could people be so callous? Is a half-price vacuum cleaner really worth a person's life? What's more, shoppers stepped over Damour's body to continue getting into the store. More shoppers casually walked by, through the broken doors, as rescue crews tried to revive the slain man. Further, when it became evident that he was dead and management tried to close the store, the crowd resisted!
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” a witness told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”
The police had to help employees clear the store.
Ridiculous is too mild a word to describe the situation. It is positively criminal. The people who broke down that door and through that man are murderers. The ones who stepped over him are guilty of negligent homicide. Did they forget their conscience at home when they went to wait in line for what they knew would be days? How does the desire to buy gifts override the instinctive concern one has for those who are injured? Perhaps these people have no such instinct.
Wal-Mart addressed the issue mildly through a spokesman, affirming the "priority" of the "safety" of their "associates": “The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this tragic time.”
The New York Times thought to seek the opinion of the United Food and Commercial Workers, whose attempts to unionize Wal-Mart employees have been continually rebuffed by the discount chain.
“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”
One has to see Mr. Both's point, even though he obviously has an agenda. Wal-Mart and store management could have done numerous things to prevent this occurrence. I doubt that Damour and his co-workers went to barricade the door of their own free will; it must have seemed dangerous at the time. Store managers must have ordered them to. This was shortsighted and irresponsible, yes, but who could have foreseen the inhuman mobbish mentality of those who broke down the door?
What truly chills me to the quick about this tragedy is that I have a dear, wonderful friend who has had the misfortune to be assigned by her temp agency to Wal-Mart for the holidays. She is nowhere near Nassau County and didn't work on Black Friday, thanks to the graces of fortune.
Negligence and a tepid concern for safety are what we have come to expect from Wal-Mart, so their role in this is unsurprising. It fits their modus operandi of low-grade insidious evil. However, it is disturbing when one realizes that each of the members of the crowd that broke down the doors of a discount store and trampled a man to death in search of bargains is a human being; a thinking, reasoning individual. They made decisions that resulted in this end. This Wal-Mart is situated in one of the richest counties and villages in the United States, and it also attracts shoppers from neighboring Queens, New York. These were not people forcing their way in out of true necessity. What was different in their experience that made it okay to break down the doors of a store in search of Black Friday bargains? Has advertising worked that heavily on the American consciousness?

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Swing State Blues...or WTFlorida?!

They're better than the red state blues, but a lot more confusing. Oh, I know this state is purple, and that political allegiances shift like the waves as the population grows and moves around, but a lot of the results around here point to an electorate that is maybe a wee bit schizophrenic.
The state managed to elect Barack Obama with 50.9% of the vote, which is close, but not unusually so for Florida. On the other hand, 62% of the electorate voted for Amendment 2, which seeks to define marriage as between one man and one woman, and outlaws anything else that "is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof". It's a sweepingly overreaching constitutional amendment, especially considering that homosexual marriage is prohibited by state statute anyway (blame Jeb Bush). Also, in rejecting Amendment 1 (by 52.1%), Florida elected to retain language in the constitution that allows the legislature to prohibit aliens ineligible for citizenship (like, oh, the king of Bhutan) from owning land.
This means that, statewide, there are about 200,000 people who voted for a black, liberal, pro-choice, pro-equality president, but also voted to ban anything that smelled like legal marriage between homosexuals and to retain the possibility of taking land away from law-abiding resident aliens. Conservative black voters? Maybe. Crackers Against Palin? Maybe. Who knows?
Locally, the results are equally as odd. I live in Hillsborough County, which is comprised of the sizable city of Tampa, its suburbs, a few smaller towns, and a large amount of rural land in the southeastern portion (it also comprises the central section of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, whereas the northern and southern ends of the bridge are in Pinellas and Manatee counties, respectively. Not that there are any voters living on the bridge). The county elected Barack Obama with 53% of the vote, reflecting the trend of population centers going blue. Amendment 1, however, failed by the same margin. Amendment 2 passed by 59% here, which I personally find sickening. However, this county elected the openly gay Kevin Beckner to the county commission with 55% of the vote. This means that 14% of this county's electorate think it is a good idea to have a gay man on the county commission, but he can't be allowed to marry his partner. Quoi?
These observations are, of course, oversimplifications in that I barely paid attention to that commission race and am not sure what arguments were thrown back and forth. I personally voted based on my dislike for Beckner's opponent Brian Blair, the former professional wrestler who has been avidly pro-uncontrolled-growth and arrogantly anti-environment.
But that's not all the fun in Hillsborough! After five years of ridiculous problems with nearly every election he supervised, Buddy Johnson (a Jeb Bush appointee), conceded his own race to his opponent Phyllis Busansky after losing votes, miscounting votes, and being out of communication for several days, leaving the Supervisor of Elections election in limbo. Tribune columnist Daniel Ruth today described Johnson as "dumber than a sack of toothpicks".

I guess the good thing is that all this swinging about keeps us Floridians on our toes.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election Night IV

I was planning for this to be a long session, to wait for into the night for election returns, and prattle on about the candidates as I did so. But with John McCain's concession speech, that closes the deal. Hopefully. I didn't get to nitpicking and criticizing Barack Obama tonight, but it seems that I will have four years to do that!

Honestly, I am so happy that our country could overcome so much in the way of nastiness and racial hatred, bigotry, dislike of "foreignness", and mudslinging. I have never been more proud to be an American than I am right now.

Election Night III

The BBC, adding the west coast to Obama's score, is calling the election for Obama. Of course, they're British, so not too sure how right that is.

But yay anyway!

Election Night II

New Mexico has been called for Obama, the first Western state to go blue so far. But it's been called red by the New York Times. Ahh, exit polls. Texas has gone red according to the BBC, and that's no surprise.

Elizabeth Dole has lost her Senate seat after one term, and apparently John Sununu also lost. There seems to be a backlash against legacy Republicans.

Election Night

This election cycle has taught us a lot about John McCain and Barack Obama. We've learned more, I think, from the way they each campaign than from any of the late election smear campaigns.

As of this point in the evening (7:30), Vermont has been called from Obama and Kentucky has been called for McCain. No real surprises there.

I was forwarded an article from Rolling Stone that completely took McCain apart from his childhood on. It made the case, very well, that McCain was a selfish, womanizing hot dog for most of his adult life. It also contended that his success in life is the direct result of flagrant nepotism. It painted the man as saying or doing absolutely anything that would make him look good, as well as making erratic decisions with sometimes disastrous consequences.
These contentions make a lot of sense in the context of McCain's political life, and his 2008 presidential campaign has provided a lot of evidence for their veracity. Sarah Palin is one such erratic decision, I feel. He seems to have spent very little time in considering her, and I believe that he only met her once or twice before declaring her his veep pick. Se was, of course, under investigation, and has very little experience on the national and world stages. Oh, and she's an idiot. Okay, that last jab was mine. Her politics are evangelical Christian conservative. If McCain was banking on the fact that she is a woman, thinking that this is the only thing that Hillary Clinton supporters care about, he seriously underestimated them. Hillary had women's issues at heart, after all, and Palin takes the opposite tack on all of them. The only think McCain could seriously hope to gain with Pain was the renewed respect of the religious right....and who would they vote for anyway? Not a Democrat.

OK,TN and SC have been called for McCain. ME,MA,CT,NJ,DE,MD and IL have been called for Obama. (8:26)

So yeah, I once said that McCain would probably be better than Bush. I don't think I believe that anymore. His reactions are too reflexive, he has too hot of a temper, he's not enough of a diplomat to be a real head of state.

Speaking of things that are ridiculous, accusations of "socialism" are really annoying echoes of Nixon's lambasting his opponents as "soft on Communism". Even if Obama was a true socialist, there is no way true socialist policy could be made with even a supermajority of Democrats in congress. There would be too much resistance. The biggest socialist steps we ever took came only after a decade of absolutely terrible economic performance. Not that our economy has really been that great during the Bush era.

Waiting with 'bated breath.