I usually find prognostications about the decadence of society to be highly exaggerated and often based on nostalgia for a non-existent idyllic past. However things like this make me reconsider:

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after being trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a frenzy.

A man has died today, not because of a stampede to get much needed foodstuffs, or to get sorely needed blankets, but simply to get things. Things for their own sake, just because you can. It was worth breaking into a store, it was worth knocking over a man, it was even worth trampling him to death. Those “lucky shoppers” can use some of the money they saved to put some flowers on his tomb.