The economic crisis is creating more poverty. This is easy to understand, and difficult to accept.
I try to make a distinction between poverty and impoverishment. Hearing about Wal Mart shoppers trampling someone to death in a frantic rush to pursue a bargain is a case of impoverishment. There is a sense that they have lost a connection to the humanity aspect of a human being.
A person who is in poverty does not have to yield their humanity. Its just the opposite, hard times require us to act more humane.
Reuters: Poverty spreading in suburbs: study
Poverty in the United States is spreading from rural and inner-city areas to the suburbs...
...poverty levels in the world's richest nation were on the rise.
2 comments:
Yah, I just heard about this 15 minutes ago. Incredible, but thinking about this, it's not really different from getting trampled at a sports event or crushed at a rock concert. Any situation where you've got a mass of people you have a potential for loss of control and danger of the sheer weight of all these 200 lb. people.
Pretty exciting really, could Black Friday morning be the suburban equivalent of running with the bulls at Pamplona? Nah, when the motivation of the stampede is buying stuff at Walmart, it's just gross.
best, Ed
It's probably a situation where it would be very difficult to assign blame.
I don't know, but it may be that nobody did anything crazy that directly killed somebody -- instead thirty people gave a bit of pressure that ended up forcing the front person to explode through the doorframe.
My dad used to tell the story of cows breaking the barn. If two started through the door at the same time and they're too stupid to back up...
Crowds are a bit like farm animals.
best,
Ed
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