We'll start with this:
Shoppers who had come to the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch on Thursday night for the much-advertised Black Friday sale got more than they bargained for when a woman used pepper spray to gain an advantage.
Anna Recalde said her teenage children were hit with the spray. At one point, she said, she smelled her 16-year-old son and asked him, "What is that?"
"Mom," he replied, "I was just pepper-sprayed."
And this:
A woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch had armed herself with the caustic spray to gain an advantage in the fight for merchandise at the Black Friday sale, a fire captain said.
The woman, who is still being sought, used the spray in more than one area of the Wal-Mart "to gain preferred access to a variety of locations in the store," said Los Angeles Fire Capt. James Carson.
Sadly, this is not all.
There is also this:
Things got out of control at one Wal-Mart near Little Rock, Arkansas on Black Friday as shoppers went wild over a good deal on kitchen appliances.
Screams could be heard as the greedy shoppers struggled to grab one (or five) of the $2 waffle irons.
And there is this:
The second Wal-Mart spraying (so far) was more in line with what we’ve come to expect when it comes to pepper spray and crowds: an off-duty police officer working store security used the weapon in the midst of a mass of unarmed shoppers. This time it was Kinston, N.C., where the painful spray wafted through a Wal-Mart.
“Sgt. Roland Davis of Kinston Public Safety says Walmart hired off-duty police officers to help with security during their Black Friday event today,” reports WITN-TV. “Davis says an officer was trying to quell a disturbance and make an arrest, and used pepper spray.”
[...]
Not all Wal-Mart trips ended in pepper spray, but several others did end in police action. In Rome, N.Y., a man was arrested after “several shoppers at the electronics department were pushed to the ground and several fights broke out,” according to NBC3 in Syracuse. And in Cave Creek, Ariz., the bomb squad took a suspected explosive device out of a Wal-Mart employee break room.
Other incidents occurred outside Wal-Mart stores early in the morning of Black Friday. In Myrtle Beach, S.C., a woman was shot in the foot during an armed robbery outside a Wal-Mart at around 1 AM. In San Leandro, Calif., a man was reportedly shot outside a Wal-Mart at about 2 a.m. “after suspects asked the victims for their items and were refused,” leading to a fight.
There's a temptation with these stories to make jokes, to move into snark and satire.
I'm not up for that today, because what I'm seeing here is actually something that I think of as part of a disintegration of the sense of other people as human beings and I don't want to contribute to that sense by making jokes about it, parodying it or diminishing it.
I've been isolated as of late. While recovering from surgery, I'm avoiding crowds or pretty much any group of people larger than three. I'll be around people again soon enough, but right now, I'm just getting stronger and to the point where I won't wince if someone accidentally bumps into me. This is good and healthy for me right now, but it also means I don't have as strong a sense of what's going on in the outside world. I'm in my own relatively pleasant bubble right now where I am fortunate enough to have the resources to heal nicely and not be worried about how much I spend on a waffle iron or whether someone else will get the bargain before me.
Intellectually, from my experience with social psychology and history, I understand what I'm seeing. When people are placed in roles in which their choices are limited or they see others as enemy, they more easily dehumanize them. This applies as easily to prisoners and guards as it does to cops and protestors as it does to [...please bear with me as I wrap this phrase around my head for a moment...] er... "competitive shoppers."
It's easier to deal with these situations by dehumanizing others, by treating people as though they are inferior to you or yourself or your kind.
Intellectually, academically, I get this.
I'm just having trouble with the concept of actually acting on it and behaving as though it is somehow acceptable to pepper spray children.
There is something seriously wrong with this, and I just can't bring myself to joke about it.
6:38 PM PT: Thanks everyone for all your thoughts and comments on this. I usually make a point of going in to rec all the comments in my posts, but I want to apologize for not having done so this time-- y'all are very talkative and I'm still pretty tired, so I'm going to just have to let it go at that. Have a good night all, and I'll see if I can write something else interesting tomorrow.