Death By Capitalismas

by tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia/PNN

The pounding kept coming, the pounding of hundreds of thousands of feet, boots, heels, and bodies on the chest, heart, lungs and skull of 34 year old temporary Walmart worker Jdimytai Damour. The relentless pounding was coming from the feet of over 2000 humans in pursuit of an Xbox, a plasma screen TV, a $2.00 dvd. In pursuit of that deal they walked, ran, stomped, and charged over the body of Jdimytal until he was suffocated.

The notion of Black Friday began in the 1960�s and related to the fact that retailers were making a huge volume of pre-christmas sales and subsequently going from the red (deficit column) to the �black� (surplus column) in their accounting.

As a person who barely survived on underground economic strategies (vending t-shirts and art on the street without a license) I know first-hand the strange mindlessness of holiday sales. Me and my mama would pray every year to sell as many shirts as we possibly could. Depending on how close to the precipice of houselessness and hunger we were that year, would determine how desperate we were and how early I would set up our �stand� outside the giant department stores in downtown San Francisco.

As the mindless minions would line up for the so-called deals, we always dreaded the strangely named black Friday � because no matter how hard we display our art no-one would notice- they were only interested in �the cheapest � deals. People would buy things without even thinking about it � just to �get it done�. Even then I wondered how we as a society were all so collectively engaged in a frenzy to buy things. And how this frenzy became associated loosely with the birth of Christ who worked his whole life in service to poor people. How in christ�s name we were all engaged in a consumer-driven mania that kills. Which is why I recently re-named it Capitalismas.

Poor, isolated single parent families like me and my mixed race, orphan mama were always faced with different forms of sad options as not only did we never have any money to take part in the consumer �based consumption we also had no �family� to share the �family� holiday with. Every year I would dread the choice of rescue mission that we would have to choose to eat in or worse, just her and me alone in our tiny Single Room Occupancy Hotel room or back-seat of car.

There are so many terrifying things about the sorrow of empty, consumer-driven holidays and events birthed by corporate media in tandem with US capitalism, dangerous, hyper-levels substance use, depression, shame, loneliness and sorrow collectively felt by thousands of people struggling with the silenced experience of poverty , loneliness, and depression fueled and worsened by the media messages of BUY BUY BUY.

Jdimytai Damour�s was only a temporary worker, a day laborer from �labor ready� out on the front-line of the war of consumerism, who along with a pregnant mama and three other people were seriously injured by the truly mindless frenzy of Walmart inspired capitalism.

There is a particularily sad irony of the death of a Walmart worker by a corporation who metaphorially and actually kills its workers with horrible benefits and soul-killing working conditions, kills the towns and small businesses of the areas that it exists in and destroys poor folks across the globe with its mandate of unrealistically cheap prices.

His family has filed a wrongful death suit against Walmart and will hopefully win everything they are asking for. But I am left with the terror in my gut of Jdimytai, how long was he conscious, how long was he aware, in terror for his survival?

And how far have we fallen into the deadly pit of consumption that we haven�t collectively mourned his death nationally and consequently stopped all of our mindless consumption if only for a moment to participate in a moment of silence for our fallen brother.