GRATEFULNESS TAKES A HOLIDAY

The doorway to the Wal-Mart was the scene of a Thanksgiving gone mad. Desecrating the spirit of the holiday, America has created a day of shopping frenzy, a day that engenders greed and the insatiable appetite for the bargain, the sale .Indeed it is "black Friday" not because reduced prices keep customers and merchants' balance sheets in the black, but because the light of gratitude is extinguished and replaced by the darkness of desire gone rampant.
To attract buyers, stores announce the availability of a limited number of goods that people want but don't necessarily need-large screen TVs, sophisticated stereo systems, computers , objects that create a word of virtual reality- at prices that can only elicit chaos and confusion.
Early Friday morning, the hordes were at the gates. In an instant, herds of half-crazed humans charged through the doors, blinded by the hoggishness of having. Like a flood that sweeps away all things in its relentless path, shoppers dashed forward, an unstoppable current of bedeviled barbarians bent on bringing home the spoils for Christmas.
Swept away was the body of a young man, trampled underfoot into oblivion by a mindless mass of stampeding souls gone berserk. A human life had been stamped out by the fires of human hunger, not for food , which could have perhaps bestowed some sympathy upon this kind of outrage, but for the needless lust of so many for the seductive idolatry of material things. Some shed a ray of understanding on this tragedy by pointing to the moderate income of these crowds; I fail to understand the justification of the poorest of the poor to crush a human life for the sake of an electrical appliance.
The world was envelopped in darkness this Thanksgiving, from far away Mumbai to a shopping mall in the affluent state of New York.
Violence and avarice adorned the tables of our day -after Thanksgiving reality. We were not content; dissatisfied in body and soul, we continued to rape the lives of others in a desperation that defies all human understanding.
Gratefulness had disappeared; sounds of thanksgiving were silenced , drowned out by bursts of bombs and gunfire, eruptions of lustful shrieks embracing the golden calves of American excess.
I pray that gratefulness will soon return from its holiday and again grace our world with its blessing of goodness,compassion and joy.