As I look at the world on the Saturday after Black Friday 2011, I say never again should we tolerate man's inhumanity towards man. We all at one time ask the question: is there any fairness in this greed-filled human race? There has not been any unanimity in our responses. What makes it harder for us to answer the question of fairness is how fairness has affected people in different ways. It always depended on the feeling of the fairness. Inevitably, our response depends on which side of the divide we found ourselves at any particular point in time. The very idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions pops up frequently.
We would have hoped that humankind would have learned so much lessons from history of recent days that humankind would abhor any act that in the least signals greed. I am ashamed to think of it. The survival instinct that pops up us all in the face of extreme poverty to stress all of us to act in a cannibalistic manner. I admit humankind is not an evil or destructive element by nature. At the same time, I make no excuse for vitriolic actions of humankind indulging in hatred or greed acts. I am in fact in a dilemma. Humankind was the source of notions like abstract thinking, progress, civilization, and all the great scientific inventions which at the same time has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often elevate great greed.
Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. Occupy Wall Street protests. It is a movement for a world revolution, a revolution that we have so much desired to see. But don't be fooled. We have had so many of them in the past. They all died off prematurely not because they did not have good motives but because they were simply unsustainable. They lack one basic natural rule; responsibility, the common human element which checks greed.
Won't you welcome Black Friday? Is Black Friday idea not in line with the anti-greed struggle? Wait a minute. Answer this question first. Why was it that several retailers (including Target, Kohls, Macy's, Best Buy, and Bealls) opened at midnight for Black Friday for the first time in 2011? Black Friday indicates the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or are "in the black". Whose interest? Perpetuation of the greed instinct in a fooling manner you have to be extremely clever to discern. If you like, Black Friday is another form of discount and discount is a hidden cost to the buyer. And how about the report that "violence mars US retail bonanza". It has been reported that the 2011 US holiday shopping season of Black Friday got off to an ugly start with several shootings and two pepper-sprayings as bargain-hunters stampeded stores. Do you smell greed on the part of the poor too? Me, me and me matter most to all.
Is there a way out of the greed quagmire? I have none but I know each humankind for self and God for us all. If you disagree, please go and set ablaze the great oceans for all I care but nothing will change. You are in a self-denial. Travel and you will understand that you are just a single individual on the surface of the whole earth. Nothing will change it; not religion, not morality, not politics, and not academics propositions. Fight your own fight and take responsibility for shaping your own destiny. Your are the driver of your life and master of your destiny. And yet bear in mind that hard work and honesty alone will not put food on the table which is at the bottom of the greed attitude. Imagination to be unique and different will. Don't get deceived, be real, life is what you make it!!!
