Anatomy is over, thank sweet baby Jesus. More on that in a future post.
For now, I'd like to expend some energy to discuss the abomination that is "Black Friday" shopping, and why we should have firebombed all the Wal-Marts of the world at 3 am today to rid ourselves of the morons who are out shopping for Christmas gifts at that time.
Perhaps I am not recalling history correctly, or perhaps my sheltered childhood led me to believe that the entire world wasn't actually insane, but it seems as though the entire "Black Friday" phenomenon really took off in the past ten years or so. When I was a kid, I don't remember anyone talking about running out early the day after Thanksgiving to stand in line for the year's hottest toys.
At any rate, the media and the businesses have formed an unholy partnership and convinced the public that they MUST sacrifice a good night's sleep in order to buy $10 Blu-Ray DVDs, and that stupid hamster thing that all the kiddos apparently want. Fine, fine, I guess if people really find that sort of thing fun, I shouldn't begrudge them their pleasures.
BUT...where is all the money coming from? Last time I checked, the economy was in the toilet, millions of people were out of jobs, an the price of everything has risen. So, how are people able to afford thousand-dollar plasma tvs? Moreover, do people really need thousand-dollar plasma tvs, and if so, why not wait until AFTER Christmas, when everything is even more on sale? The logic baffles me.
Perhaps the crazy conservatives really do have a point that the "Christ" has been taken out of "Christmas" - after all, I don't recall reading anywhere in the Bible, "And Jesus said unto his followers, 'Take thyself to a Target and buy thy kin all manner of worthless overpriced junk, in celebration of thy Lord's fabulous divine birthday!'" Of course, we are disregarding the fact that Jesus, if he even existed, was not born in December, and the "faithful" are really celebrating an amalgamation pagan solstice/Roman feast. But okay, so we'll ignore the history of Christmas too. And I won't even mention how sad it is that people like to chop down trees in order to drape them with tacky lights in their living rooms...
Americans should really try to calm the fuck down. They should be instructed by the major media personalities to take a deep breath, meditate for a while, and THEN trample Wal-Mart employees in the mad rush to get a Snuggie.
I'm just sayin'.
I hate, hate, HATE Black Friday. I hate all the focus on manufactured wants. I hate making holidays about the getting of THINGS.
ReplyDeleteI had to laugh when I finally got around to reading a story about what the hot toys were this year -- we have never even heard about any of them because we don't have a TV at our house. We either watch DVDs or online programming at sites like Hulu, which have far less child-targeted advertising, and what advertising they DO have is incredibly brief compared to what you get watching cable.
Heh. I only know what the "hot toys" are from reading about them online. I only recently brought my tv back back from home after a 6-month hiatus (cable is SO expensive!), but it doesn't get turned on very much.
ReplyDelete