On Being Trampled to Death at Wal-Mart in Valley Stream

Arriving home is never easy after a long trip to another culture. With the machine gun blasts still reverberating from the Mumbai attacks when we got off the plane at JFK yesterday afternoon, we were startled to learn that Jdimytai Damour, 34, an employee at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, NY, was killed when 2,000 maniacal customers pushed through the doors on Black Friday, impatient and murderous to begin their holiday shopping before dawn.

How can this be?

We have become a nation of consumers, desperate to shop. With unemployment at an historic high, insecurity in the very bowels of American business--banking, automobile, publishing, media, even computers and software--, and foreclosures of family homes as well as rental apartments because of irresponsible lending to landlords, this identity is threatened, turning ordinary people into monsters, uncaring monsters. I grew up in the town next to Valley Stream. The area was once solidly working and middle class, nothing fancy, many first generation home owners, with their children being the first to attend college. The people who live there now are more vulnerable, perhaps having bought houses they couldn't quite afford, lured by fast and easy credit; perhaps their jobs are on the line; perhaps they see their futures and their children's futures diminishing.

Having just returned from the Czech Republic where ordinary people became monsters during the Nazi occupation, I am not surprised. We all have this potential inside us. This isn't a matter of "them" and "us." This is a matter of "we."

Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Blink about how people become hardened to suffering when they are in a rush. People don't stop to help other people when they are late. Inside our brains we make an evaluation of what is more important: ourselves and our lives or that of a suffering stranger. So the desperation that filled the anxious crowd waiting to confirm their identities as consumers made each individual callous, reinforced by the crowd. That's what happens to human beings.

That's not what happens to monsters. This is what happens to human beings.