Blacker than we thought

Happy thanksgiving everyone. I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday and found it to be a peaceful rest from the craziness of this time of year. Who would have known it was a harbinger for even more craziness.
Craziness is what occurred at 12, 3, 5, or 7 in the morning the following day, Friday. Friday after Thanksgiving is known as "Black Friday," a day on which consumers flock to stores to get the hot new deals and sales that companies offer for only a few short hours.
Black Friday started early this year. Usually, early is at 5 in the morning. Sometimes early is at 3 in the morning. Unusually, midnight is early. This year, however, we saw a whole new act of crazy. Stores began to open during the Thanksgiving holiday in an attempt to get even more shoppers to flock to their stores. The advertisers couldn't even wait until the single day on the calendar dedicated completely and entirely to them, but they also had to bleed over into the only day a year dedicated to thankfulness.
I see something vividly wrong with putting Thanksgiving and Black Friday next to each other on the calendar. Lets set up a full parallel. On one side, we have the day during which we are supposed to spend the day basking in all that is great about the lives that we live. We are supposed to acknowledge just how good we have it in life and to be happy with what we have. Now, on the other hand, we are supposed to sprint to the stores, fight in the aisles of stores, wait in hours long lines, and argue and heckle over prices just so that we may accumulate more STUFF. We aren't buying any prayer books here people (although I apologize if religious items were on your wish list). We were buying TVs, jewelry, appliances, and clothing.
The spirit of the holidays that of giving, and I understand that. Black Friday is most often about buying for others, about getting our holiday shopping list done for all of those people who we want to buy gifts for. That is admirable, that we are spending our time and money on others. Still, though, I am still critical of the day for a number of reasons. The first is that not all shopping is so benevolent. Much of it is just as selfish as on any other day of the year: going to get the hot deal so that we can get things for ourselves. Another reason is that I do not believe it is an emergency to good things for others. You don't need to rush out and cut short your day of thanksgiving to buy stuff for other people. We need to make sure that we are giving one of our most important holidays its due, and giving it entirely.
I am just as guilty of Black Friday spending. I purchased a new watch at a store for a mind-blowing price. I was pleased. My new watch makes me happy. But I did it at 2 in the afternoon, the day after I had celebrated all that I already had.
We can be consumers looking for the best deals, but we need to make sure that we are getting the important days in order. Thanksgiving is not merely a holiday that we have to get around simply so that we can get to Black Friday. It is, rather, one of our most important national celebrations, and should be given respect as such.

Part 2: Money matters

This is the second in a four part series of posts that deal with some of my most significant feels about change in the current world.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, money does make the world go round. For every good act or motion of kindness, at the very least money was needed to make it a possibility.

I just recently was exposed to an idea. This idea is referred to as the Pareto Principle. This principal states that, at least when used as intended, 80 percent of the wealth of a given area is owned by 20 percent of the people. This is fascinating, in that there are many statistics that show that even more of the percentage of wealth is owned by even less people. If so few people are making up so much of the wealth of a nation or of the world, then what is all of the money going towards?

A perfect example is the ever-more popular growth of ridiculous salaries in professional sports. Players are now making $100 million easily over a 6 to 10 year span. Such easy money makes me question why that money isn’t being sent elsewhere. As great as sports are, the bottom line is that they are not life and death situations. Why can’t all the money that one team was going to spend on one player go to one country to feed one population for one year? All of the ones add up.

There are lots of places that this can be seen. Whether it is one nights proceeds in a certain form of entertainment or certain sporting events or a thousand of other areas, if just a few corporations spent even one night giving away everything it raised, then why couldn’t we, as a people, completely annihilate hunger on a global scale.

Apple just released the new iPhone 4G. Thousands and thousands of people flocked to get this phone the instant it hit the market. I have an idea. Goodness knows that there will be SOME form of iPhone 5 (whether it is in the form of a phone or something all the more outlandish). What if every dime that was made by the selling of this item went to solving hunger problems in third world countries? Here is what I see happening: The iPhone 5 sells several thousand items in the first year. All of the money goes to saving starving African villages. Now when Apple releases a new computer the following month, all of the money goes straight to Apple to compensate for the lost money that they suffered (if you can call solving world hunger suffering) by giving the money away. Well, now that Apple has demonstrated a public interest in solving global issues, all of a sudden everyone wants to buy an Apple computer because the image of the company is one of compassion and selflessness. All of a sudden, not only has Apple made back every dime it lost from the iPhone experiment, but has grown their business in the process. Everyone wins.

Now this experiment may seem outrageous, and frankly I don’t know enough about organizations and how much profit certain groups make. Apple may not make enough per unit to make this feasible, let alone realistic. All I am saying is that steps can and should be made to make sure that important issues are taken care of, and if we continue to say things like “that isn’t the way things work,” we will never, ever see results.