It used to be that when I watched one of those Black Friday videos I\u2019d be overcome with feelings of contempt and disgust.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5w7FjW3QeiQ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOnly in America,\u201d I\u2019d mutter to myself. The greed, the sales-drunk shoppers camping out in parking lots and then pouring through the front doors of Walmart like some sort of flesh tsunami, all stampeding and thundering down the aisles ripping discounted toasters and Xboxes from one another as if on some demented, nightmare game show, seemed parodic, a bit of cinema constructed for a dystopian movie and not a regular, predictable part of American life. It was the sort of theatre that always made me feel morally superior, cozy and safe in the knowledge that I would never behave in such a desperate, quasi-apocalyptic manner.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, all I was really doing was sneering at poor people. Feasting on a genre of poverty porn, I would pat myself on the back, fashioning some sort of moral virtue out of what was actually snobbery and a glaring lack of empathy.<\/p>\n

These videos that are so roundly circulated and mocked, may depict the results of greed, but not as personified by the unmediated appetite of the mob on the floor. No, the greed is taking place off-camera, up in the offices and towers of Walmart (which as a corporation makes about 16 billion a year in profit and pays it\u2019s typical full-time employee less than $25,000 a year). The scrabbling peasants rioting beneath, their behaviour is the product of exclusion, of living in an aggressively consumer culture where material ascension must never yield.<\/p>\n

Lacking sufficient funds to live the mythic \u201cAmerican Dream,\u201d people who are working really hard just to survive, must wake up each day feeling like they\u2019re missing out. In a nation where it\u2019s said that the average child can identify 1,000 corporate logos and people are constantly bombarded, concussed, really, with messages that the good life is a narrative expressed largely through class, what hope do we truly have of feeling satisfied with what we have? If we get more stuff, we\u2019ll be better off, is the message, and if you\u2019re poor you\u2019re relegated to live in an acutely felt state of deprivation while an inaccessible and teasing world glitters all around.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nothing to laugh at, and as a culture we\u2019re finally starting to understand that.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It used to be that when I watched one of those Black Friday videos I\u2019d be overcome with feelings of contempt and disgust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[427,1180,3031,3033,1752,177,3035,796,783,3039,1753,1222,3036,3037,77,3034,3032,3030,3038],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4914"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4930,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914\/revisions\/4930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}