From TruthDig
By Marie Cocco

Two weeks ago I wrote that this was going to be a Wal-Mart Christmas, a deeply discounted holiday season for a middle class whose well-being has itself been discounted by an economic and political culture that has diminished paychecks and benefits for years. I could not have anticipated the most macabre manifestation of the syndrome: the death of a Wal-Mart worker who was trampled by a mob of early shoppers Friday on Long Island.

The story is an allegory of our time.

The victim was, in fact, a seasonal worker not hired by Wal-Mart but by an employment agency. The crowd had been building overnight at the entrance of the sprawling store in Valley Stream—by 3:30 a.m., Nassau County police already had been called to calm the throng. They were among an estimated 73.6 million shoppers around the country who turned out for day-after-Thanksgiving sales, lured in part by pre-dawn “doorbuster” specials, a term that turns out to have been tragically literal.

Just before the scheduled 5 a.m. opening—an hour at which shoppers had been promised such delights as a 42-inch HDTV for $598 and popular DVDs for as little as $2—the crowd stampeded through the glass doors, throwing Jdimytai Damour to the floor and creating such chaos that even the first police who rushed to aid the dying man were jostled by irate bargain-hunters, according to Newsday.

Once inside, other Wal-Mart employees asked the early shoppers to leave because of the tragedy. Still, some ignored the request as they blithely filled their baskets with the consumer flotsam and jetsam for which they’d waited through the night.

The disturbing parallel is the case of Kitty Genovese, the young Queens woman whose 1964 murder by stabbing sparked a round of national soul-searching. Genovese’s cries for help were ignored by neighbors even as she crawled, screaming, from the site of an initial attack to the vestibule of her apartment building. Windows slammed shut; apartment lights that had been briefly turned on went out.

Read more Merry Wal-Mart