Black Friday

ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, standing in for Charlie Gibson last Friday, informed her viewers that the term “Black Friday” referred to the deeply felt hope of US merchants that they would find themselves “in the black” when the day was done.  (They did.)  This is the traditional “first shopping day of Christmas,” the day after Thanksgiving. 

The story on Black Friday, showing shoppers mauling one another in the malls, racing for flat screens, computers, and mixers, followed without any real transition the lead story with images from bloody Iraq.  The pairing of the stories created a grotesque irony.  The shoppers in Iraqi?  They were among the many who had been blown up earlier that day by car bombs and suicide bombers.  This was a Black Friday in Iraq as well.  More than 80 citizens were murdered that day.  The day before (our Thanksgiving), more than 200 civilians were killed.  The two-day total was one shy of 300.[1]

By the time the news story on the US version of Black Friday got to a young man with an armload of electronics, I was feeling sick at heart.  “No, these things are all for me,” he said when asked if he had finished his Christmas shopping.  This 20-something is not at fault; he is a relatively innocent perp in this clash of cultures.  Maybe the news editors understood what they were creating by pairing these stories.  This contrast is not lost on anyone in the Middle East, I am sure, nor should it be lost here either.

To initiate the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace and the Champion of the Poor on the day after giving thanks for our life’s abundant blessings with a national buying binge is sardonic[2] all by itself.  But when this is contrasted with the bloodshed in Iraq and elsewhere, as well as with the lifestyles of the vast majority of fellow human beings around our single globe, this becomes truly abominable.  It is as though we are possessed by a demonic spirit that propels us through this sacred season blind to all life except our own while acting collectively at odds with the Sacred Spirit that is supposed to be the season’s purpose.

Demonic?  If demonic means acting in opposition to Divine Aims and these aims point toward the common good, the well-being of all, then the spirit of self-focused greed lavishly promoted by powerful financial interests is unarguably demonic.  (Though I suspect there will be some arguments about this point.) 

When we are self-focused – scheming to buy as many fantastic goodies at a fabulous price as possible – we find it virtually impossible to be concerned with the well-being of others.  There doesn’t seem to be enough room in the CPU’s of our individual psyches to process, let alone make sense of, these two very different streams of concerns. 

The uncomfortable tension provoked by the clash of images between the haves-in-abundance and the have-nots-in-serious-deprivation often is resolved through shallow rationalizations and actions.  If the poor are in the US, it is typical to say that they could have it too if they really wanted to work.  If the poor live in other countries and we can’t ignore them, a frequent comment is to say that someday they, too, will have what we have.  Another one, being used widely today, is that they hate us because of what we have.

These arguments are, to say the least, incomplete.  Yet they have appeal because there is a grain of truth in each case.  Some adults don’t like to work and want everything given to them (though not all of them are poor by any means).  Many of the developing nations are moving as rapidly as possible to achieve what we have (along with the pollution, social disruption and environmental degradation we also have).  Envy of those who have more has been noted for millennia (nor is this limited to the poor; I’ve witnessed the very wealthy be envious of the very, very wealthy). 

But these views are only partially true and certainly far from the fully compassionate perspective.  I am convinced that the incompleteness of these arguments is felt and known to at least some degree even by those who shout them out.  In fact, I suspect that some of those who shout the loudest are the most in touch with the painful pull to radically alter their self-focused life-styles. 

What is this spirit that runs so contrary to the Spirit that aims at compassion for all?  Like many of our most problematical human behaviors, such as violence and racism, I see greed and selfishness as having biological roots.  The very biology that enabled homo sapiens to survive and thrive now endangers our very existence.  In a hostile world, where the environment could not always be counted on to provide true necessities on a consistent basis, where other groups and other species were competing to survive, where differences in looks (e.g., race), sounds, smells and behaviors could spell death, homo sapiens would have needed a certain amount of greed and selfishness to protect the group through tough times as well as a willingness to use force to protect the group from outside dangers, automatically dividing the world into friend and foe – people you cared about and people you did not.

But key religious leaders several millennia ago began to point the way beyond this, informing their followers that the Sacred Creator wanted human beings to care for all people in the way in which they cared about their own tribe, their own clan, their own family, their own community. 

To get there, we have to be honest with ourselves about our own divided tendencies.  Most if not all of us have a drive to get the most for us and our own.  This has to be recognized and accepted as a part of our inner reality at the same time that we work to transcend this.  Denial of these roots only fuels our shadow which, Jung pointed out, erupts in truly nasty ways at the worst times.  Paradoxically, acceptance of our more brutish roots makes it possible for us to transcend them in pursuit for the  higher, more inclusive perspective.  This is a perspective we must achieve in order to continue to survive and thrive as we move into a global society. 

Those of us in our nation of abundance will not be able to continue to keep and protect our lifestyles.  They are, in the context of the world, unsustainable.  Allow me to suggest why:  Financial pyramid schemes, where the money is supposed to funnel up from an ever-expanding base, are alluring and illegal.  They are alluring because it looks like there will be a lot of something (money) for virtually nothing.  They are illegal because they don’t work:  Somewhere around the 12^th or 13^th repetition of six people who each recruit six people who each recruit six people, one has to either resurrect the dead or clone new souls because the earth’s population is exhausted. 

And yet this is really the form of our economy and the aim for the global economy.  Our economy only works if it expands indefinitely.  Unfortunately, the earth’s resources are not infinite.  This huge globe is incapable of producing an ever-expanding range of products, is unable to absorb the toxic byproducts created by the manufacture and use of these products and it is not large enough to store them at the end of their life cycle, as trash.  Our compassion, in other words, needs to extend not just to all peoples but to the well-being of our planet. 

I suspect to make a change as profound as we need to make in our attitudes, our economic philosophy, and our behaviors will require a catastrophic crisis.  Again, this is part of our biology.  We easily habituate to small changes over an extended period of time. 

And, yet, prior to this ultimate crisis, there are changes we can begin to make in our personal and collective values if we allow ourselves to feel the pain caused by holding together these two images of Black Friday.  When we have the courage to do this, we immediately know there is something wrong and we feel compelled to do something about it, even in the face of enormous cultural and familial pressure to “stay the course.” 

Holding these two images together until we can find a way to honor the healthy essence of both will, in fact, enlarge our CPU.  The healthy essence of both?  The purest spirit of compassion exists on both sides, one for family and loved ones and one for strangers.  These two simply need to be woven together, creating a healthy balance to replace today’s enormous imbalance.

Celebrating the birth of hope and the advent of peace and goodwill to all does not require lavish gifts to those who have much.  Giving one’s time and full attention to another goes much deeper, is sustainable, and enriches the world’s emotional environment.  Feeling compassion for others who are truly on life’s margins will lead to find ways to restructure our world so that they, too, can be safe, can be fed, can be supported in their own efforts at self- and community-realization in the context of our global society.  This is the Spirit in which this season is rooted.  May that Spirit flourish for your and yours, and around the globe!

– David E. Roy

Copyright 2006 by David E. Roy, All Rights Reserved.

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