![\"Jdimytai](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/jdimytai-damour.jpg?resize=188%2C250&ssl=1\" "\\"jdimytai-damour\\"")
<\/a>If you’ve been part of a group with a singular purpose by\u0412\u00a0going en masse to a store, getting to work, getting your morning coffee; you’ve participated in herd behavior. In\u0412\u00a0that setting\u0412\u00a0you’ve relinquished your individual sense of containment and let the group ride you toward your collective goal. Your needs, as in the case of the WalMart opening, become the group’s need and the group takes over.<\/p>\n
Wikipedia describes herd behavior<\/a>\u0412\u00a0as a way that individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. Taken to an extreme, such as\u0412\u00a0a violent rush of fans at a soccer match, or panic at a Wall Street selloff, or a riot at the RNC convention<\/a>,\u0412\u00a0herd behavior can amplify into a headlong group rush resembling a kind of momentum-based madness resulting in injury and death.<\/p>\n We’ve all participated in herd behavior at one time or another. Pushing to get in queue for a bus or a subway train, cramming as many people as we can into an elevator, we do this\u0412\u00a0so we can get to\u0412\u00a0work on time. Ever try to\u0412\u00a0walk\u0412\u00a05th Avenue in mid-town Manhattan\u0412\u00a0in the height of the tourist season? Even in mellow, hyper-politically conscious\u0412\u00a0Berkeley, CA\u0412\u00a0where I live, the crowd outside of the Berkeley Bowl supermarket\u0412\u00a0on a Saturday morning at\u0412\u00a08:45am, fifteen minutes before the store opens, can be a threatening growl, particularly\u0412\u00a0during the holidays. Never get in front of a\u0412\u00a0citizen of the People’s Republic of Berkeley when you can get a deal on bulk almond butter at The Bowl.\u0412\u00a0It could get ugly. People get weird when they want\u0412\u00a0what they want. But that’s small scale excess compared to Wal-Mart.\u0412\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Take a look at your typical Wal-Mart store. Or a Costco, or a Target. Ever noticed how these stores are made? I first got a clue when I took my car into the Costco parking lot to park\u0412\u00a0by a special access\u0412\u00a0pass provided the School District I work for. Walking through a dark parking lot the size of a whole city block, I saw, near the exit, the loading docks where Costco goods are delivered into the store. Four big doors, twenty-feet high, enough for the entire open end of a mac truck to insert itself like a vacuum tube and deposit its goodies. A huge thing dump.<\/p>\n Walking through Costco, you’re inundated with acres of tables filled with cheaply-made goods, goods presented on palettes, boxes of back-up inventory stacked thirty-feet high. As you shop, you have a sense of your own meaninglessness just by comparison with the sheer size and scale of the store. There are lines of people waiting to get checked out\u0412\u00a0by electronic scanner, customers with big rolling palette-holding grocery carts, store card in hand. Now maybe Wal-Marts are smaller in scale, but the principle remains the same — selling massive quantities of goods made elsewhere in as non-intimate a setting as possible.\u0412\u00a0It’s de-humanizing.<\/p>\n I’m not excusing the behavior<\/a>\u0412\u00a0of these shoppers for the tragic incident — they are not alone in culpability. But it should come as no surprise then, especially to Wal-Mart stores\u0412\u00a0that the Wal-Mart shoppers waiting long hours in bitter winter cold on Black Friday\u0412\u00a0acted with their most basic herding insincts. They’ve been trained to accept it with Wal-Mart, which was designed to herd them in, get them to buy mass quantities and herd them out. Just like cattle.<\/p>\n And just like any big box store where we’ve become accustomed to bargains buying in bulk, and having it all available in one big, block-sized establishment,\u0412\u00a0you are as far away from a personal accountability moment as a microbe is as far from the research assistant. You don’t exist — except for your photo ID\u0412\u00a0card.<\/p>\n Yours & truly,<\/p>\n Fe Bongolan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Friend and Reader, READING THE NEWS this weekend\u0412\u00a0about a Wal-Mart worker\u0412\u00a0who was trampled to death by the\u0412\u00a0rush of early-morning Christmas shoppers on Black Friday, I am reminded of\u0412\u00a0the title of Denis Johnson’s\u0412\u00a0play, Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames,\u0412\u00a0which explores the descending madness of a family in a trailer-park America setting consumed by television, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,52,117,709],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7283"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}