The Griffon News

It begins with Black Friday, a day when the retail industry does a majority of the business it will do all year in one day, a day when the books go from the red to the black.

People line up in the wee hours of the morning outside of malls and stores eagerly awaiting the lifting of aluminum gates, the opening of glass doors and the cutting of ribbons, so they can rush through like a swarm of locusts, pouring into the stores and stripping the shelves bare of product.

I bet the credit companies really like Black Friday.

Every holiday season it seems that Americans’ collective psyche becomes just a touch more insane.

Each year, malls begin playing the dreaded holiday music a day earlier than last year; this year East Hills started in with Christmas carols a week before Thanksgiving.

Each year the television companies unleash the holiday commercials just a bit sooner than before. Each year the money machine that manipulates our country masterminds its profit
plan just a tad sooner than it did before.

Each year the Jones set the bar just a touch higher with their outlandish and gaudy lawn adornments and light displays.

Each year, we the consumer sit and beg for it and drool like the Pavlovian dogs we have been programmed to be. It is sheer madness. In 1996 people began the “brawling for Elmo” phenomenon that has endured to this day.

Every holiday season that has passed has had at least one news story of shoppers who abandoned all civilized veneer and began to violently make their grab for the cherished toy at the top of their kids’ wish list.

It will be a sign of troubled times when soccer moms take to rumbling in the aisles like the Jets and the Sharks in some choreographed combat to the Christmas spirit.

It isn’t that far off.

Spend the holidays working in the mall and the heights of human giving can be seen alongside the lowest point people will stoop.

Old women will push toddlers aside to make their way through the throng of humanity.

Teenagers will roam the halls of consumerism like the gangs of olde New York.

The poor and destitute will up their credit limit one more time and the payday advance business will wag their tongues in a gluttonous anticipation for the lives to be destroyed.

Each holiday season traffic accident rates soar, depression and suicide hit an annual high, people eat more and drink and spend more than the rest of the previous year like Americans begin subconsciously sucking our collective thumb like a preschool child trying to sleep through the domestic abuse that is going on just outside in the hallway.

Just how far is this madness going to go?

When does it stop?

The ancient and mysterious Central American civilization, the Mayans, have this elaborate wheel calendar that is measured with settings relating to the heavens, it is amazingly precise for such an ancient culture. The Mayan Long Count calendar was supposed to measure from the beginning of time to the end, which they figured to be Dec. 21, 2012, at just sometime after eight in the morning.

The average American adult would probably be well into their work morning, still jittery from their coffee buzz.

The Mayans believed that as the world came closer to the end of the fifth age, events would begin to accelerate.

It would seem as if every year time was just slipping away.

Maybe that is where the all of this holiday madness is leading. At the heights of our mass insanity, a cosmic convergence will occur that ends the world as we know it. If that is the case then I, being a big fan of it being time for the gods to press the big reset button in the sky, say lets go shopping.

I hope your semesters ended as enlightening as mine. Happy Holidays suckers, see you next semester.