In his blog, "Exercise in Futility" (http://anexerciseinfutility.blogspot.com), Tommy wrote eloquently today about the murder of Mr. Idimytai Damour, a temporary employee at a WalMart in the village of Valley Stream on Long Island at 4:55 a.m. yesterday morning. My thanks to him for opening a dialog on this event, which shapes the mold of the stinking, hot, rapacious underbelly of a corporate-government-led society gone amuck in this country… "Stuff" on paper for the rich; “stuff” made of metal and plastic for the rest of us, but, as Robert McFadden and Angela Macropoulos report on today’s TorontoStar.com, even as the masses grabbed their shares off Wall Street through the year, other masses pressed and churned and finally broke through the glass doors of a brick-and-mortar yesterday before daybreak, simply marching over Mr. Damour, a 34 year old worker, until shoes and boots trampling his body left him dead [the exact cause of death is not yet published by a medical examiner]. To be sure, there are “reports” by “witnesses” who saw the horror, but we can be every bit as confident there are men and women of every size and shape who did not make it home before throwing into trash bins the Nike Cross-Trainers and the Crocs Bistros that reached deep into soft gut tissue or ground rib against sternum amidst the general dull roar and the overarching single scream.
The particular details of this event need to be richly imagined with all our senses. Mr. Idimytai Damour’s deeply humane soul needs to be brought into fullest relief against that grinding throng; the guilt and the shame of 2,000 plus people need to be examined before the horror of a nation…because there is a great dissimilarity between this incident (and others like it in recent years wherein bystanders insolently disregard persons being killed or tortured within feet on city streets) and the two in Mecca that Tommy mentions in his blog. In both of those incidents, the throngs were moving toward something they believed in so deeply that (as we have, sadly, learned through this decade) they were prepared to sacrifice lives to carry forth their mission. In this incident, it was not spiritual conviction but total self-interested greed that killed that young man…not so much as the common good of two or more people working for a united cause. This was a case of “each to his/her own”: fearing that the person in front or in back of him/her would claim whatever in the store “rightfully” belonged to that one person in line. Avarice killed Mr. Damour. Avarice to the power of 2000. Avarice on the part of the store who knew the crowd was dangerous and did not hire appropriate crowd-control. Avarice that reopened the store rather than leave it closed as a memorial to a man who died a horrible, needless death. Avarice not unlike that occurring all across the country yesterday.
Within 24 days of showing the world that America can work together in new and positive, progressive, potentially world-changing ways, we have ripped open our bowels in front of the world to expose the true diet of lust for the quick fix we feed ourselves. We are all accountable for this tragedy if we do not take the time necessary to reflect on what this incident means about our cultural values, our community values, our personal values, ourselves as members of the human family.
