Jdimytai Damour We Will Slow Down

This morning, a cold wet Sunday - the neighborhood feels empty.  Jdimytai Damour's death on Black Friday is the overwhelming suffocating dream that we are walking around inside of here.  I'm aware this morning of the degree to which the meaning of justice in our culture is driven by martyrdom, from Jesus to Gandhi to Emma Goldman to Che to Dr. King and Malcolm and John Lennon and Harvey Milk...   These famous freedom-fighters whose lives were cut short... And then sometimes a Rodney King or Sean Bell will burst into view, when the injustice can't hide even the most obscure among us. Jdimytai "Jimbo" Damour has died in that blur that we, in our little comic activist group - sought to bring focus to, to slow down.  We put our bodies there every year, dawn on Black Friday.  We intuited that this was the place for change.  This was Rosa Parks seat on the bus in the time of Consumerism.  Now this young man has fallen there.  I say "there," it feels like "here."  Must we have martyrdom to have new meaning?   -- Rev

Neil exposed you.  You hate capitolism and Neil Cavuto exposed it then LET YOU GO.

From the depths of my cramping gutpain I weep.

I don't buy martyrdom.

Like I don't buy presents. 

Here is my gutpain:

What I saw was a mostly black crowd stampeding a black man to death...so they could further enrich the richest white family in the US, by buying goods made by slaves in Chinese labor camps.

Don't read that too fast. Don't jump to conclusions about what I'm saying. Don't go all liberal Democrat on my ass.

My gutpain is seeing this logjam of injustice, indifference, and self-hatred. It can't be Hoped away by the convenient desire to pretend racism is all gone. This is a racism so internalized that the message of the massas--buy this thing, be better for a moment, till we have something new for you to buy--means more to shoppers than their neighbor's life. Whether that's the man opening the store door, or the people at their elbows competing for the same tossed bones of consumption.

It would have been no better if everyone in question had been white; that's not my point. My point is that racism isn't just people dissing each other's skin. It's also at least in part classism, and one of the manifestations of classism is greedy consumption as a path to alleviate one's soul suffering, one's loss, one's emptiness. Desperately trying to stuff holes in hearts with things. 

And don't we preach what depths of insecurity and self-hatred lead people into the addiction to things? Or indifference to a worker's life? Or to the lives of those against whom they grappled over these consumerist scraps?

And aren't we now called to preach this harsh jeremiad: how can Wal-Mart get away with sending a lone/sole sub-minimum-wage worker out to face hundreds of pumped up "blitz line" consumers, racing to enslave themselves to more things?
 
Wal-Mart. Plantation owners. In a form as diabolical as the kind my family fought against in the Civil War. 

I've been reading that it'll be a good three years before the US can be out of Iraq because we bought so much Stuff (materiel) and transported it there, we have to stay till we use it up.

I am retreating to my studio now to make posters. My throat is too busy crying to cry out against Nineveh.


Pope Rabid

The man killed was not employed by Walmart. He was their agent, not their employee.

He was working for a security agency hired by Walmart. Using the security agency, rather than hiring an employee, allows Walmart to escape some liability and responsibility.

If Damour had just been injured, he would be seeking workmen’s comp from the security firm and wouldn’t get anything from Walmart. Since he died, Walmart will assert that his survivors should be limited to obtaining compensation from his employer — the security firm — actually, the security firm’s payments to NY state workmen’s comp, not from Walmart.

To obtain compensation, Damour’s survivors need to sue. Their case would be much stronger if NY State finds Walmart to have exercised criminal negligence with regard to crowd control. Walmart would settle quickly out of court, if the firm is criminally charged. If Walmart is not criminally charged, Walmart will push the civil trial far to the future and the survivors won’t see a cent for a decade or more.

Death Benefits per the New York State Workmen's Compensation Board

If the worker dies from a compensable injury, the surviving spouse and/or minor children, and lacking such, other dependents as defined by law, are entitled to weekly cash benefits. The amount is equal to two-thirds of the deceased worker's average weekly wage for the year before the accident. The weekly compensation may not exceed the weekly maximum, despite the number of dependents.

If there are no surviving children, spouse, grandchildren, grandparents, brothers or sisters, parents or grandparents entitled to compensation, the surviving parents or the estate of the deceased worker may be entitled to payment of a sum of $50,000. Funeral expenses may also be paid, up to $6,000 in Metropolitan New York counties; up to $5,000 in all others.
 

Yeah, But $147 for a flat screen TV is pretty good, you gotta admit.

I never knew him during his short life but for our family and I hope for yours, Jdimytai will be a symbol for the change we must believe in for our future.

Yes I agree, Jdimytai Damour will remain a symbol.  We are thinking of how to keep his memory alive even as he becomes a forgotten news item, even as the more recent violence in Palestine and elsewhere covers up the horror at that Wal-Mart. But the consumer world that caused those people to come through those doors like a stampede of crazed addicts - that still remains with us.  In fact - it has much to do with many forms of newsy violence.  We still have so much work to do. And of course, and maybe Jdimytai would agree, some of our work should take the form of joyful song, laughing and praying and pranking for justice with a newfound force.  -- Rev