The recent trampling-to-death of a Wal-Mart employee on "Black Friday" has received a lot of press coverage. The coverage started by recounting the events and the resulting lawsuit, but quickly began moralizing and seeking cause.

ABC News blames the economy, in "Bad Economy, Dangerous Holiday Shopping."

The Moscow News Weekly blames human nature in general and Western consumerism in particular - "Black Friday."

Columnists and writers to the editor all across the country offer varying explanations, usually heavy in the use of the words "greed", "animalistic", and/or "heartless." Here, here, here, here, and here.

It's apparently very difficult to condemn the event without self-righteous generalizing.

Can we truthfully judge the core value of a culture by looking at where people get trampled? [We'll discard the events where people die escaping a fire, building collapse, shooter, etc. Avoiding sure death is a universal human value.] A quick search shows that hundreds die every year during the Hajj in Mecca. 93 died in 1989 at a soccer match in Britain. A combination of a rainstorm and a rock concert caused 54 people, mostly young girls, to be trampled to death in Belarus in 1999. Just this year, nearly 150 people were killed in a stampede in a Hindu Temple in India. A full list of modern "crowd-related deaths" can be found at http://www.crowddynamics.com/technical/ by clicking on the "Crowd Disasters" link at right. [This is an all-around interesting site - using scientific methods to analyze the dynamics of too many people in not enough space]

The wide diversity of event types and locations for trampling deaths seems to preclude any values-based analysis. In terms of physically damaging moral values, based on world-wide events, religious piety and attending soccer matches seem to be the worst. Yet we don't see round condemnation of the culture of soccer, or of religious pilgrimage.

It's easier to condemn a culture of consumerism. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of consumerism myself. My wife and I bought our family's Christmas presents at a local craft fair, and I do most of my clothes shopping at a consignment shop. But I've benefited, too, from the consumer-based economy that's in part responsible for making our society the most prosperous in history. I'm also hurt, along with the rest of the country, by the current financial backlash to this type of culture/economy.

Condemning the greed of post-Thanksgiving shoppers necessitates drawing a line between ourselves and the tramplers. In reality, that greedy, heartless mob is composed of individuals who, I would venture to say, are not *really* that much different from the rest of us. "Ye who is without sin..."