Black Friday Column

Black Friday. In the stock market that is a phrase that strikes terror for investors. Today it marks a color of hope for retailers who depend on this season to move from the red into the black ink of profit. this year some stores never closed.People who would never get up early normally are in the lines to find the promised bargains at the big box stores.

Religious killjoys love to take shots at Black Friday. for us, it is the height of a consumerist culture gone mad, covetousness in the flesh. I don’t want to be a killjoy today. It’s fun for a lot of people to go into a shopping frenzy. it has the feel of a hunt for game. One of the reasons the stores were packed early in the morning is that we are also demonstrating the virtue of being frugal..

Some of us need some time out of the house after trudging through time with family as if it were a forced march in the gulag. I had a friend who worked part-time as a bartender. he loved going into work on Thanksgiving afternoon. As he said, “by 2PM most of us have had enough of family, so the tips are really good when I can serve them a drink without giving them any advice or trying to get under their skin.”

I am grateful that a lot of new movies come out where we can find some refuge during the holiday weekend. For a couple of hours, movies provide an escape from the stress and strain of the holiday weekend. If different generations go and enjoy say, the new Muppet movie, it gives shared experience, and maybe even a bonding experience.

Some of us want some time getting after we have been hit with righteous, sometimes unctuous, demands that we must, must, be thankful, be grateful that reach a culmination on Thanksgiving day. On this day after Thanksgiving, I wonder abut the efficacy of trying to use guilt as a weapon to try to force people to be grateful.

Emerging work in social psychology demonstrates that gratitude makes us feel better and handle trouble better. A recent study found that students who had made a point of being grateful handled a poor set of remarks on an essay better. Story Corps is asking us all over the country to thank a teacher directly or posting a memory on their site. NPR ran a whole series on the project yesterday. You could hear the deep emotion from those who thanked a teacher. You could hear the shock and surprise of people who said that they never realized that they made a difference in someone’s life and were thrilled to actually hear an old student actually tell them.

I went to a rigid, punitive Catholic school. We had one teacher who was not a nun, Helen. She wanted to enter a religious order but she honored her father’s command not to do so. Instead she devoted her life to the church and class by class was able to teach. It was not what she taught us, not that she was often frustrated with us, but she was the teacher who loved us and showed a love of God every day of her life.. When I was an adult, I ran into her, and her face shone as she heard what we were doing. The stores are filled with people whose lives were touched by teachers. Teachers enable us to earn a living to be in these stores. They gave us the tools to examine consumerism or to be come literate observers of movies, and maybe even the relational tools to deal with family. I thank God for their impact, even on Black Friday.