Inverse Paradigm

Those of you out there who inconvenienced someone in your rampaging behavior to get some object on the day after Thanksgiving ought to have to tell the person you gave it to what it cost. The folks who trampled the Walmart employee to death back in ’05 should have to tell their kids that someone died so they could have whatever it was. The guy who flung a wheelchair bound lady to the ground in the stampede should have to look the child in the eye and say “I knocked down someone your Grandma’s age to get this for you because she was in my way.”

This kind of thing isn’t happening in every single store everywhere in the country during the first hour of opening on Black Friday. The reports come in of injuries, fist fights and the like. And I read them and think, it’s not worth it. Being able to say you got the latest item for yourself or your kid is not worth anyone’s life or health. Stores should spread those sales over the weekend, not open before dawn and make sure there is enough of the hot items so that this riot-like behavior doesn’t happen. The stores could make more money, have happier customers and there would be no deaths and injuries.

Neither of these two scenarios will happen. Stores like creating urgency and scarcity to drive sales and we the consumers don’t have enough independence to see through it all. It’s sad. And I’m way too cynical to think I’ll ever be surprised by people where money is concerned.

Someone called me Scrooge once when I wasn’t trying to hold anyone back from their “Christmas cheer” except that I did not/do not care to be included in it. I think the conversation started out about holiday traffic on 24 December and I said that when my shift was over I wanted to go home and didn’t care anything about Xmas shopping and didn’t want to deal with the fury of last minute gift hunt traffic.

But the truth is I don’t practice any tradition beyond the occasional church service. I don’t put up trees or any other decoration and I don’t get all giddy with excitement over the 2-1/2 weeks of about 18 December through 2 January. Sorry folks. There are a few people I exchange gifts with and that is because we do have a tradition of that but that’s about it as far as the stores are concerned. Christmas is supposed to be about Christ and what I see when I look at the world out there is a lot of buying and selling. In fact the cadre of manipulators who gave us $4/gal. gas this past summer lowered the price to almost a buck so we’d shake loose a few of those saved coins in the stores.

So with all that in mind you will please forgive my lack of enthusiasm over portly gentlemen in red suits who supposedly know every intimate detail of my life and can squeeze their adipose tissue-laden bodies down a million flues on one night a year and all the other red and green and evergreen trees and hymn singing etc, etc.

But.

It doesn’t stop there.

Then we have Easter. Formerly known as Ishtar, Ashtoreth and Astarte. We just got done with the birth of Christ. Now 33 years later we have the death of Christ or more specifically the resurrection of Christ. This is another holiday hijacked by stores that doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to. Now there’s not much gifting beyond sharing candy and giving kids baskets. But none of it really has anything to do with Christianity. The colours change a bit as well as the theme but it’s the same merchandising mania. So I don’t do much for this one either beyond attending services and since I am child-free, there are no baskets or hiding of eggs.

Again I do not wish to impede anyone’s celebration of either of these holidays other than to impose a lack of participation. Whatever it is that you do during this time, go for it. Just don’t expect to see me.

Today is Limbo Day. The banks are closed today so I can’t do anything I had wanted to do this week until tomorrow. And I have to get up early tomorrow because they close at 1pm. I really wanted to make a significant payment on my truck this week. I get off work at 11 tonight. Hopefully I can get there in time. I’m still waiting for the reimbursed stolen money to go back into my account. And you wonder why they say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.

I have a 3-day weekend given the holiday. I have to say I am glad to have the MLK holiday off, but part of me will enjoy the “in between” time from February-May. I prefer my vacation time to national holidays. Vacation is me time. On national holidays everything stops. Everyone’s out on the road and nobody’s working. When I have vacation I can still transact business and such. I just don’t have to be at work. It feels freer. I’m not saying I don’t want the holidays off. Just that I enjoy the vacation time more.

So I’m selfish.

A week from this coming Monday is MLK day. Since we generally don’t get invited to cook outs I am going to spend that time sorting out some of the junk I have piled around my weight machine. I need to start using it again since I may or may not get another gym membership. The gym was an interesting social environment back in 1991 but now with all the personal electronics it’s really just a bunch of people walking from area to area working out and there doesn’t seem to be much going on in the way of socialization. There is a lot of stuff here that just need to go in the trash and a lot that can be donated and I might find a few things that can be sold. When I cleared out my storage unit last year a lot of the boxes went around the weight machine. It’s time to get rid of that stuff because I have a 2BR house. I don’t have catacombs and tunnels to take stuff that I “might need someday” and drop it off. There is no vault here, although I could probably use a fireproof safe. So we may head over to Papa Murphy’s on Sunday and get a couple of pizzas and break open that pizza baking stone thing that I bought a while back and is still in the box.

I am really looking forward to having MLK Day off. I worked both holidays and while I appreciate the extra pay the part of me that is still tired wishes I had taken those days off. I have a couple days vacation at the end of the month. I am hoping some friends will be having a Mardi Gras party on the Saturday before Super Fat Tuesday.