Help the man up off the floor
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. -William Butler Yeats
Dear lord. We have lost our minds. We have so disengaged from our lives that things have taken precedence over people. Amy Guth pointed me to this story from this morning's New York Daily News:
A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.
The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the store opened at 5 a.m.
Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back."
Have we lost our ever loving minds, my friends? What happens to us? As individuals, we are thoughtful, kind, merciful people. In crowds? Not so much. Are we addicted to things, to Elmo dolls and new iPhones and telescoping feather dusters at the expense of human beings? Are we losing ourselves in the aisles of Wal-Mart? I believe we are, sometimes in great force and sometimes so incrementally we can't see the loss.
At the end of our lives, we will sit alone or with a few people, uncomforted by the things of our lives, but held up by the people in our lives instead. We will have no need for that new toaster oven, the one for which we trampled a man to death. We have fallen prey to infomercials, to a quest for meaning outside of ourselves, when it is inside we will find that meaning. Only inside. Deeply inside, that place that doesn't need high-speed internet connections or bread makers.
Meaning comes not with a 25% off coupon or a new iPod, but in the spaces we cultivate between us. The best things in life are not things, my friends, and this man's family and the family of that unborn child will forever mourn them, an even deeper loss at the inhumanity of it, the senselessness, the dark awful hole of consumerism that caused it.
Regain perspective this holiday season, and stay human. Live life on a simpler scale, a slower one, a more human and humane one, one with fewer gadgets and more love. Simple, human love. Hold to your center. Help the man up off the floor.
