By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I write this on Black Friday, otherwise known as the busiest shopping day of the year. Knowing what we know about how “calling in” energy and “naming” it can lead to self-fulfilling prophecy, I find myself wanting to shake the nation like a rag doll and tell it what I tell my loved ones when they speak thoughtlessly: This is NOT a black day! Take it back! Do NOT put such a description out into the universe, giving it permission to reflect back to you!
Black Friday. The origin of the term began in the 1960s in Philadelphia, when police bemoaned the day after Thanksgiving — and beginning of holiday sales — as a snarl of traffic and headaches. Since then, we’ve come to know it as the day sales enter the black for many businesses that have operated in the red throughout the year, anticipating the annual holiday madness that will put things right at the end. Today, capitalism throws a bone to the little folks, while for the Pentagon, Big Pharma, insurance companies and industrial-complexes of all kinds, EVERY day is flush with holiday spending. They no doubt Fa-La-La all year long, but for the rest of us, the joy-joy starts now!
Visiting with my daughter and grandkids here in California, we joined other family members on Thanksgiving, a total of 27 of us. Our yearly reunion found us rejoicing over a couple of hapless, but succulent, turkeys, and trimmings too numerous to mention. Driving to my cousin’s house, my son-in-law went out of his way to cruise by Best Buy, circling the building to estimate the number of people camped out in advance of the midnight opening. At noon, there was a cue of thirty or forty, camping in tents or sitting in lawn chairs. Scouting the possibility of snagging a discounted television, we took an alternate route home at dusk. At another store location, numbers had tripled, lines forming to the side and rear of the massive building, overseen by a uniformed security guard. Deciding to shop via internet instead, we drove home past two WalMarts with crammed parking lots, thinking that a benign sign of shopping excess. Turns out WalMart was scariest of all this year.