This is what "Let him die" looks like

This needs no further comment from me:



(via)

To all those who trampled Jdimytai Damour to death yesterday: This is who you murdered

I'm haunted by the murder of Jdimytai Damour yesterday by a thundering mob of greedy bargain-hunters in Valley Stream, New York yesterday. I find myself wondering why a temporary worker was the one opening the doors. When I was in retail in the late 1970's, it was always a store manager who unlocked the doors in the morning. Why did this task fall to this man? Did the management of this Wal-Mart store expect this kind of stempede and set him up to be the fall guy?

Here is the man who sacrificed his life yesterday so that a bunch of soulless pigs could grab up as much cheap crap as they could carry:

Jdimytai Damour, 34, the Wal-Mart worker who died Friday after shoppers stampeded in a Valley Stream store, was an easygoing, helpful man who loved poetry, friends and family said.

Family friend Ronald Jean Myrthil, of Bridgeport, Conn., said Damour came to pick him up after he had staggered across the Brooklyn Bridge, fleeing Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. Another time, when Myrthil needed to go to the hospital, Damour took him.

Damour's father, a Queens school bus driver, is at a loss to understand his son's fate.

"I don't know what happened to him. He's gone. Only God knows what happened to him," said his father, Ogera Charles, of Fresh Meadows.

A Freeport High School graduate, Damour attended Nassau Community College for a year, his father said.

His family roots are in Haiti, and he had a brother and four sisters, said Nicole Jean, 60, a Rosedale woman who described herself as a close family friend. Damour's mother, who lives in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is flying up this weekend.

Myrthil, who is Jean's son, said Damour was a big man and had no apparent health problems. Damour did construction work for a time and installed fences, he said.

Damour loved poetry, and he was a fan of the late novelist Donald Goines, the friend said.

He was easygoing - a nice guy, Myrthil said. "A very good kid.

Note to Barack Obama: You cannot be civilized with these people

Now do you understand that trying to bob and weave and dodge the poisoned darts that the Republicans are throwing at you; that shaking your head ruefully and speaking with great poise and dignity about how "disappointed" you are with McCain, is NOT the way to deal with these people?

How many elections of Democrats taking the high road and claiming that Americans are "too smart to fall for this" does it take before you realize that no, they aren't. Or even if they are, they CHOOSE to fall for it. They choose to fall for it the same way a sizable number have chosen to believe that you are a Muslim spy, that you aren't really a native-born American citizen (funny how that never bothered them during the Great Arnold-for-President frenzy of 2007), and now, apparently, that you have murdered untold numbers of people.

Republicans know what Americans will believe. They understand that small, mean, scared part of the human brain that Rod Serling so deftly pointed out in the classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street". They understand how when faced with a choice between more of the same, even if the same is bad, and a change that can in any way be portrayed as Really, Really Scary, more of the same wins every time. Because Americans hate risk, and we hate change, and we hate difference.

Look at how children are being raised today. Yesterday I wrote about the body armor and the car seats and the antibacterial wipes, but there's more. There are the kids who aren't allowed to play in their own yards because Mom is terrified after watching too much television news that predators lurk behind every tree, ready to take their children. There are the kids whose parents call every day because they're frantic with worry. And yet, these same parents push their kids into youth sports without caring about the backgrounds of the coaches or the lead leaching from the artificial turf that cronies of the local government put down. They feed them soda and Lunchables and fast food. They delude themselves that Fruit Roll-Ups are just as good as fruit. They're ignorant of the radiation emanating from their granite countertops in their gourmet kitchens. So it isn't about the safety, it's really about the fear.

And as we all know, fear works. And when you combine fear of change (new, not well-known, young) with racism (black) and ignorance (Muslim charges), and throw it into a media maw that has demonstrated quite clearly that its masters WILL have John McCain in the White House, you have the environment in which McCain can get away with this:

A new McCain ad that began airing Saturday in selected markets also chides Obama as disrespectful for making "time to go to the gym" during his European visit while at the same time canceling the visit with wounded troops.

"Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras," according to the ad, which is being televised in Colorado, Pennsylvania and the Washington D.C. area. "John McCain is always there for our troops."

McCain himself joined in the rebuke, saying in an interview to be aired Sunday by ABC's "This Week" that "if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn't visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event."

And because Charlie Gibson and George Suckupagus are firmly in the tank for McCain, you can bet that there will be absolutely no questioning about MCain's implication that NOTHING will get in the way of HIS photo-op -- not even the whether the use of “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead” is appropriate.

Senator, your campaign's pinky-in-the-air response:

"Senator McCain knows full well that Senator Obama strongly supports and honors our troops, which is what makes this attack so disingenuous. This politicization of our soldiers is exactly what Senator Obama sought to avoid,"

...is exactly what the Republicans expect from you. It is the presidential campaign equivalent of the Sternly Worded Letter from Congress™ -- and you see how far that's gotten the Senate and House in getting any cooperation from the Bush Administration.

If this is how your campaign is going to handle these outrages in the fall, then you might as well throw in the towel before the convention even happens. Because history has shown that whether you find it distasteful or not, and even whether Americans find it distasteful or not, when push comes to shove, they will vote for the sleazy, lying, dirty campaigner over the classy guy who think intelligent people of goodwill can disagree every single time.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Sometimes when I hear the things that my friends who have children tell me I wonder what the hell is happening in suburbia. It's clear that the social-climbing, keeping up with the Joneses factor is ferocious in some communities, particularly those situated next to more affluent ones. In recent years it's been fed by a wave of home equity loan-financed purchases of more cars, home theatres, giant additions designed so that children never, ever have to share a bathroom, luxury vacations, and other trappings of what middle-class people believe to be characteristic of the lives of the wealthy. I know people whose kids refuse to wear anything that doesn't come from Hollister or Abercrombie and Fitch -- companies whose stores refuse to hire anyone who isn't, as the mother of one employee who looked like a cross between Jodie Foster and Gwyneth Paltrow once told me, "perfect."

Kids have always been cruel to each other. I was a chubby kid and I developed pimples at the age of nine, which ended up with me being called by a nickname that referred to my skin problems by the very boys I wanted to like me when I was thirteen. I look at photos of myself from that time and wonder about the disconnect between how I felt and how I looked. But at least in those days, kids had to be cruel to your face, or if not to your face, at least it took place in meat world.

Today, kids can gang up on each other without even leaving the house. Perhaps what happened to the Meier family could have happened even when I was a kid. I'm sure that even then, there were kids who killed themselves because they could no longer bear the ridicule of their peers. But what the hell does it say about a society in which PARENTS get involved in the tormenting? What kind of sick fuck do you have to be to play mind games with a teenager because she had a falling out with your kid?

If I were an adolescent now, I probably wouldn't have survived to adulthood either.

(via Melissa)