Black Friday

Is it just me or are you just as bored and annoyed with the growing media coverage of "Black Friday?"

Really, just how interesting is it to see a bunch of half-crazed people lining up outside Walmart or Best Buy the day after Thanksgiving so they can be the first to buy a half-priced plasma TV at 5 AM?

It's just depressing to see so many potentially lovely aspects of American life (such as a gracious holiday like Thanksgiving) reduced to how much they register on some corporate entity's bottom line. It may be a corny thought, but perhaps holidays might actually serve a better purpose than giving us license to buy even more things that we don't really need. Perhaps the respite of a holiday should better provide us with the time and space to gain perspective on whether the toiling we all do throughout the year is yielding the kind of life we want.

I don't want to spoil anyone's holiday buzz, but our collective calendar should be more than just a connect-the-dots of numbers that don't really explain much about where we are at as a society. Do we all need to know that Tomkat's wedding cost a million dollars? Should I lose sleep if retailers don't earn more this Christmas than last? Will ad prices for a Superbowl minute be as high as everyone expects? Will Memorial Day weekend gross more in movie ticket sales than last year?

I was amazed to discover just how many "Black Fridays" there have been over the past century. Check out Wikipedia for a list that includes the great Johnstown Flood of 1889 and a massacre of Iranian protesters in 1978 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday). In the company of so many genuine horrors, describing self-induced, high-stress shopping as a "Black Friday" event seems like a sadly callow choice of words.