Shop till you drop (dead) over the Holidays!

Back on November 1st, I came across something that absolutely ruined my week, and possibly even the holiday season. I was watching SNL that night when it cut to its first round of commercials. One of them was a Christmas themed ad for Lowe's, complete with 'cutesy' kids decorating the tree, Christmas music, and scenes of people dopeishly pushing their shopping carts full of useless, excessive shit. The ad immediately made me sour. How dare they start shoving this shit down our throats no less than 24 hours since Halloween, I thought. Have they no shame? Honestly!

I wanted to do something about it besides drone on into friend's ears about how pissed off I was about this, etc, so I'd thought to follow the advice of my roommate and write a column for York's campus rag, or even start a blog about it, thus giving me a mass audience to bitch to. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that my thoughts and opinions could possibly make me sound like a complete kook, writing phrases that could be easily translated into: "These ads are warping our BRAINS, people!", so I was a little hesitant to write it. Not to mention I fell into some lazy days around the time of the ad since the T.A.'s at York went on strike a few days later, thus wiping out any real motivation to write it. 

As the days went on, I still remained stand off-ish about it, and continued to cringe and scoff at every time I saw yet another  billboard on the Toronto subway or TV ad bite the dust and make an early pitch to eager holiday consumers, but at the same time, I still felt the need to load my argument with better ammo. Luckily, I've been inspired recently to search for weird news articles to exchange with my friends back home, so I just so happened to come across this article on America's most trusted news source:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/11/28/black.friday.violence/index.html

You heard it right people, a Wal-Mart worker trampled to death for opening the door to a wild pack of shoppers, and two people shot dead over a dispute over toys at a toys store. Is the reality of crazed, irrational North American consumerism? That people who want to buy toasters with a shelf life of 10 months and other throw away Wal-Mart merchandise at half price so badly that they are willing to completely disregard the fellow human being trampled to death? That people will come to gun violence over discount toys? This just seems so crazy to me...

What's even worse is the response of the retailers and CNN, blatantly and disgracefully denying that their sales and their media campaigns had anything to do with the deaths. Give me a break! And besides, aren't you people supposed to be in a recession?

To quote the movie that Kevin watches on Home Alone

- "Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal!"

... at least I have my Christmas party in December to look forward to...