If you got up this morning for Black Friday bargains, certainly hope you got one or more. The kid who worked part-time in Two Guys stores in East Brunswick and in Manalapan, New Jersey, hopes you're pleased with your purchase and remembers being angrier than all get out when we had to work "normal" hours on what was always considered by everyone not on the clock to be a holiday weekend. Didn't mind the paycheck, though....
In the eat or be eaten world in which we live, all the retailers, or nearly all from my working class hero days, are memories or vapor. Now the world is our oyster, pearls sold separately. You name it, we can get it for you, 24/7/365-and if it's not legal or moral, we have a lawyer and a clergyman on call to handle your qualms. The only unforgivable sin is the one that's fattening and we have a staff dietician to handle the excess avoirdupois, so ride easy.
In light of the hair-pulling and finger-pointing going on in the nation's capital, I'm wondering how silent a Silent Night we might have this Christmas. The same kid who clerked at defunct retailers was in the middle of the mob scenes you've read about in the late sixties and early seventies but I was mostly oblivious to the peril and the danger.
Funny how growing old changes your perspective on your personal invulnerability (actually, it's hysterical but no one feels like laughing). I'm watching us edge closer to the abyss as a nation as we blithely surrender any ability for reasoned discussion and civilized debate and opt, instead, for name calling and invective.
Will the next American Revolution be between the Haves and the Have Nots and how do we think that will turn out and what do we suppose the rest of the world will do as devour one another in a rising tide of recrimination and retribution for all manner of sins, real and/or imagined, but mostly projected?
If those still-seasick settlers clinging to the coast of New England on that First Thanksgiving had behaved then the way we are now, what would be here for us to Black Friday ourselves into a trance about? We can wring our hands or we can join them together and rebuild what we have and make it better. There's only so long so many will be content to only talk about what happens next before acting on all the talk. And at that point there will be no one left to listen.
"The world around me's turning, I'm just standing still.
The time has come for changes. Do something, or I will."
-bill kenny
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