Black Friday

I’ve just been watching on the BBC website pictures of people fighting and pushing and yelling around items in supermarkets on so-called black Friday. Tesco’s et al should be ashamed of themselves it’s demeaning of human dignity and respect and it’s a tragedy in the sense of who we are. For we are more than consumers, much, much more and yet the culture is restricting and narrowing our vision of who we are to what we own and what we can get for basically nothing. Watching a particular scene of people with their hands outstretched for TVs was rather chilling and reminded me of similar pictures where the starving have their hands outstretched for a bowl of rice. It’s the system that grinds us down – the post capitalist era is reaching a new low and clearly can’t continue. I guess I think it’s immoral and we all become players (whether we shop on Black Friday or not) manipulated in some terrible game of profit and of course of destruction… Because our level of consumption is both unnecessary and not sustainable.

And for those of us who are Christians there is something so cynical and so calculated or perhaps also so true in the naming of the day as Black Friday which is in bleak contrast to Good Friday where the image is of Christ stripped of all – yes and his dignity – but nailed to the cross in absolute surrender to the will of God.