viz.

Image Credit: Huffington Post

This past Thanksgiving/Black Friday combo gave me some time to reflect on (read: be befuddled about) some of the paradoxical impulses these distinctly American holidays encourage. On Thanksgiving day, as I finished cobbling together the world's simplest casserole to take over to a friend's, my partner was snoring the next room, trying to catch a few proverbial Z's before heading in to work for a midnight shift. I muttered my frustrations into gravy that stubbornly insisted on being lumpy, desperately trying to mobilize holiday vibes and feel thankful about the jobs my partner and I are lucky to have. No dice, though. The fact that someone I love had to miss out on dinner with friends in order to be awake for a middle-of-the-night work day made me all sorts of spiteful. Increasingly, more and more people are in this terrible boat.





It didn't help that, come Black Friday, the internet (myself included, being a denizen of that place) was bombarded by images of people brawling over discounted towels, standing in staggeringly long lines and stampeding madly through aisles lined with price-cut goodies.



Image Credit: ABC News

Now, call it my liberal proclivities, but Thanksgiving itself has always made me all sorts of antsy. I don't think that our culture should be able to neatly shake off the genocidal realities that are integrally attached to this holiday, but what to do about that particular paradox escapes me. The Black Friday thing might just be the nail in the coffin for my personal Turkey Day (which, serious issues about American history aside, is hard enough to celebrate with your meat-loving family when you're a vegetarian). At dinner itself, sympathetic ears enabled me to laugh bitterly about the polarized urges associated with the back-to-back “holidays” of Thanksgiving and Black Friday (I'm calling Black Friday a holiday in the bacchanalian sense). Thanksgiving supposedly asks us to count blessings, take stock of the most important things in our lives and reflect upon our good fortune. It's day about contentment, right? Nipping hard on its heels, however, comes Black Friday, a day to ferociously acquire more and more, revel in materialism and forget about all those points of contentment from yesterday.



Did I say yesterday? My mistake. This year big-name stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy decided to open their doors on Thanksgiving Day, ringing in Black Friday before the leftovers had time to cool. Granted, many professions give up their holidays every year in order to ensure the safety and well-being of others. Police officers, nurses, doctors, fire fighters, can't simply check out and head home en masse. When retail workers join the herd of “crucial service providers,” though, something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong. Flipping through images of fights and arguments, the only news about Black Friday seemed to be bad news: basic humanity forgotten, common decency left at the sliding glass doors. Is this a good thing, though? Visual activism to discourage Black Friday madness? I find myself wondering whether this massive influx of images will help quell the raging fires of consumerism or simply toss more fuel on the culture of Black Friday. If part of the celebration (here's the bacchanalia again) involves enjoying the violence and the spectacle, maybe visual exposés aren't really the way to go.