A Black Day for the planet

Throughout this 'you' doesn't mean You, 

of course, it means everyone else.

You have a long weekend: Thanksgiving is a holiday, you can finagle your employer into giving you the bridging Friday off.
Q. What to do?
A. Why shop till you drop, of course!
As if shopping to fulfill your own unmet desires isn't enough you are now being schmoozed into fulfilling the unmet desires of an increasingly wide circle of friends-and-relations. Time was when presents would be given at birthday and Christmas to children who hadn't yet started working down the mine or in a sweat-shop. Your children, not the neighbour's children - even if they had invited yours to the party. Certainly not work-colleagues or the adult neighbours.  Back in the day, you'd pile everyone into the car and drive to the Mall and loaf around the shops being bedazzled.  That would be more exercise than you'd gotten in the week - unless you were already so hideously obese that you needed to motor scooter to move.

Now you don't even get that amount of exercise or family time. The kids are all up in their bedrooms  devicing away to Amazon and ordering up new devices, toys and games because everything they can see is tired, borrrring and, well, yesterday. Mom is in the kitchen ordering things that the kids don't want - because she is two weeks adrift in what's hip. Dad is in the den watching the big match and ordering a bigger tool.  Article in LinkedIn calling the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas "Shipocalypse" from the tsunami of card-board boxes which are being carried about the country. On-line merchants (not just Amazon) are expecting to clear $1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) of Stuff from their warehouses in the holiday period. No holiday for the minimum-wage sweated-labor drones who are competing with robots in the sheds. The average freight-load per US person is 60 tonnes a year; more than a ton of shite every week. You can't eat a ton of food, or wear a tonne of apparel, so there's got to be some lawn-mowers and flat-screen TVs in there. Make sure you gift your mailman - cash is handiest because that's the only thing the hernia doctor is interested in.

As if Black Friday isn't enough, they've dubbed the following workday Cyber Monday, where you can dessert yourself mightily with more gizmos. But please have a care for other people: they have a better idea of what they want than you do. Let them decide what to order up on-line - that will be disappointing enough. Me, I'm delighted to be going to work today.