Bonehead Sunday

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Just when it seemed that the country had unexpectedly come to its senses during the election November 6 come images of thousands of supposedly normal Americans stampeding into some discount store at 8 PM last night. How many dropped in their tracks due to a surfeit of stuffing and giblet gravy, pumpkin pie, turkey, mashed potatoes and accompanying hooch is unknown. The fact is that someone should have been on hand to say “wait a minute,” and I’m not talking about a greeter. This much physical and financial exertion on a full stomach is just not healthy. Even Todd Akin’s doctor should know that.

Black Friday got its name because it was the day retailers moved their annual statements into the black. I would suggest it is also the day that the ‘screens’ in several persons’ heads go black as they pile into malls as an act of Capitalism. Is the possibility of getting a jillion-inch high-def TV at a ‘door-buster’ price worth getting trampled to death? Seems so.

Having just sat through two of the most crashingly boring football games in recent memory Thanksgiving Day waiting for the cranberry sauce to pass my appendix without incident, nobody is going to get me out on any color Friday on the off-chance of getting some cheap appliance at a low price. The traffic stinks, the people seem to be nuts, and elbow-to-elbow human sending is not my favorite form of exercise.

This year we also have Small Business Saturday, if you survive Friday, so that lesser retailers can cash in on the spending frenzy. What would Karl Marx have made of all this? I’d like to propose another holiday, an added day of atonement, Bonehead Sunday when everybody just stays home, takes inventory of all the dumb and excessive things they’ve been doing for the past three days and figures out how they are going to pay for it all.

Tom Godfrey

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