People are Animals

I’ve had my suspicions for many years, but now I’m totally convinced. People are Animals! There really is no other explanation for what happened this past Friday, November 28th.

I’m speaking of course of the tragic Black Friday sales event at a Long Island, New York Walmart store in which an employee was trampled to death and several other shoppers sent to hospital with injuries.


You can bandy about such terms as mob mentality, unfortunate accident, or rampant consumerism. Plain and simple it was a stampede, and that word best describes a herd of animals out of control.

Now when people stampede in an attempt to escape a burning or collapsing building that’s one thing, but when the only motivation is to save large sums of money on consumer goods it is shameful and totally inexcusable.

According to news reports, some people in the crowd, when asked to leave the store, refused. Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like “savages…. When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning. They kept shopping.”

That, in a nutshell demonstrates the totally self-centered attitude of many of our fellow citizens today. Just the belief that the inconvenience of waiting several hours trumps public damages, the death of another human being, and the serious injuries of others, speaks volumes about the morals surrounding us. I hope the ones involved are very proud of themselves.