Instead of helping an elderly man who collapsed to the floor in a West Virginia Target Store on Black Friday morning, Christmas shoppers merely stepped over him in their haste to get at bargain merchandise.
MSNBC is reporting that Walter Vance, a 61 year-old pharmacist with a prior heart condition was shopping with his wife at a Target store at 12:15 a.m. on Black Friday in South Charleston when he got sick and collapsed to the floor. Witnesses said some shoppers ignored him and even stepped over his body in their haste to get at sale merchandise.
"Where is the good Samaritan side of people?" said Sue Compton, one of Vance's co-workers, to WSAZ-TV. "How could you not notice someone was in trouble? I just don't understand if people didn't help what their reason was, other than greed because of a sale."
Eventually, an emergency room nurse found Vance and began administering CPR. An off-duty paramedic also came to his aid but it was too late. He died shortly after being taken to a nearby hospital.
Unfortunately, this was only one of this year's most appalling examples of the secular version of Christmas in America.
A woman shopping at a Walmart in Porter Ranch, California turned on fellow shoppers seeking discounted X-box game sets by spraying them with pepper spray. She eventually surrendered herself to police.
Also in California, a shooting outside a shopping mall in San Leandro left one shopper critically injured.
Another incident involved an exhausted Target worker in Florida who accidently drove her car into a canal and had to be rescued early on Black Friday morning. This was after Target employees launched a petition campaign asking their employer not to open the store at midnight but keep the former 5:00 a.m. hours to allow them more time to spend with their families. The petition went viral and received over 100,000 comments from across the country.
Christ is the meaning of the Christmas and when we stripped Him from this holy season, we stripped away its essential meaning, thus reducing Christmas in America to a sorry caricature of what it used to be. Whenever and wherever we remove Christ from our culture, be it from our schools, courthouses, or stadiums, we remove the morality, the civility, the incentive to strive to be better human beings.
As the above examples prove, the hollow "Happy Holidays" is just no substitute for the "peace and good will to all" that can only be found in the heart of Christ's Christmas.
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