I will not waste my keystrokes trying to scandalize behemoth retailer Walmart for its glaring lack of foresight or concern for the safety of its employees or its customers. Nor will I engage in a bitter dissertation about the corporate distortion of a benign Christian tradition that has brought us to this point of shop-or-die economic Darwinism. I will instead simply let the facts speak for themselves.

Most of us have worked retail jobs that have made us feel about as appreciated as a toilet seat. Few of us have ever experienced the monumental failure of humanity that ended the life of 34 year old Jdimytai Damour. At a staggering six-foot-five, 270 pounds, Damour was not exactly an easy man to topple, yet on the morning of November 28th a crowd estimated at around 2,000 people surged the entrance to the Walmart where Damour worked and brought the large metal doors crashing down onto him.

“Those hundreds of people who did make their way into the store, literally had to step over or around him or unfortunately on him to get into the Wal-Mart store,” Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey said earlier this week.

There we have it. Even after their explosive entry into the storefront the crowd did not scatter in a panic, nor did they back away from the building with the obvious anticipation of law enforcement descending upon the chaos they had just created. They just marched on in, over the gates they had destroyed, and over the man trapped beneath them. This man was literally crushed to death.

In the aftermath of the incident every new fact that emerges seems worse than the last. Fourteen year old Alicio Sgro reported that her arm was broken by an enraged shopper forcing his way past her. A twenty-eight year old woman who was eight months pregnant was knocked to the floor in the surge. At last report, mother and baby are fine.

Jordan Hecht, the attorney representing the family of Damour, has filed suit in the state Supreme Court in Bronx, NY against the infamous corporate retailer. Also named in the suit was the Nassau County Police Department, who may very well be blameless; retailers in the shopping center were clearly instructed in the weeks prior to the incident that each store was responsible for its own security and crowd control.

No official store security was on-hand according to current reports and although there was a claim that barricades were in use, it would not seem that they were inside the doorway or effective in preventing access to it.

Peter Goodman, an economics writer for the New York Times, seems bent on portraying these stampeders as hapless victims in a terrifying scheme of corporate greed to take advantage of their dire financial circumstances.

They were engaging in early-morning shopping as contact sport. American business has long excelled at creating a sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out. It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things they wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.

If we are expected to give this incident the pardon of “violence fueled by desperation”, then I will make the necessary counterpoint that we, as Americans, are only now being forced to learn what true desperation feels like. Our recent economic debacle has exposed a nationwide vulnerability that our poor have always known but the rest of us would rather suppress than confront. For the benefit of context, consider a vignette from the history of a nation known all too well for poverty and suppression.

On May 14, 1896 a crowd of over 300,000 Russian citizens gathered in Khodinka Field along the outskirts of Moscow for the coronation ceremony of Czar Nicholas II. To commemorate the event, the royal court had commissioned beautiful hand-enameled cups to be given away to gatherers. Also to be given away en masse was food and drink, but word (or rumor) spread quickly through the crowd that the supply was insufficient … triggering a stampede that ended in the crushing deaths of anywhere between several hundred to several thousand people, many of whom were simply desperate for food. In this unforeseen context, each cup was therefore known as a “Cup of Sorrows”. In researching the specifics for this report, I am amused by the irony that I got more matches for web pages selling the cups as top-dollar collectible antiques than pages giving reliable historical background on the incident that made them so valuable in the first place.

Goodman’s hyperbole of mindless desperado as an acceptable catalyst for this sort of grotesque social cannibalism, wherein we destroy strangers to fulfill our obligations to loved ones, is a misfire. I believe that the facts speak clearly to another, less palatable truth: people are bombarded with advertising for objects they could never afford. Tease them with the opportunity to lay hands on it, and they will sacrifice their time, their health, their reputations and their honor to get it. That single choice is what seperates victim from aggressor and puts the integrity of our entire culture on its back under the crush of blatant materialism.