Marcel Winatschek

Black Friday

Black Friday in America is organized violence. After Thanksgiving, when people are still full and drunk, the stores open and something switches. They shoot each other for parking spots. They trample strangers for toys. They run each other over. Four dead, sixty-seven injured over the past seven years, according to the website keeping count.

I’ve watched the footage. The chaos is real and specific. All that rage and screaming for a TV at half price, a PlayStation on discount, things that stop mattering pretty fast.

It’s a window into what a culture actually values—not what it claims to, but what it will kill for. The answer is: merchandise. A sale. Stuff.

The worst that happens where I am on a holiday weekend is the supermarket sells out before close. An inconvenience. Over there, people are dying in parking lots for the same basic impulse: more, cheaper, now. I think about that gap whenever the holidays come around.