The Water Waits

We caught the Long Island Railroad at Penn Station, 15 of us – headed for the Valley Stream, Long Island Wal-Mart, where on Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day one year ago, Djimytai Damour was trampled to death.

At the Valley Stream stop we got out and descended the stairs for our journey to the “Green Acres” shopping center. We slowed down on the steps going down from the elevated track, we could only stare. Before us was a pure strain of urban sprawl. How to describe it? This was a star nursery of parking lots, parking lots begetting parking lots. It seems that parking is what people do here. And this was Black Friday, so the highways and avenues were also jammed with parking, but with people inside, smoking cigarettes, picking at -lackberries.

In the Church of Life After Shopping, we appreciate the pastoral grace of walking. In paved Valley Stream, you feel like a rebel just using your feet. Isn’t there a freedom of expression in it? A gentle rocking of the hips that the puritan cars may find suspicious. Our overt walking for a mile and a half, toward the Wal Mart logo, was opposed by simply so many thousands of cars, those strange bubbles of glass and metal on wheels. We zig-zagged patiently through them, but we felt the pressure of the cars all the way through our singing memorial for Djimytai.

As we walked, we all had the same question. How does a place like this develop? This is a place that hates human beings. How are the decisions made that add up to this place? How does it happen in a Democracy? How is such an inhuman place called “Green Acres” or “Valley Stream” or even… normal.

Over a year ago now, at 6 AM, the consumers ran from their cars to try to get to the flat-screen TV’s radically discounted in the back of the Wal-Mart. At the border between the cars and the products, standing in the front door in charge of security was a young man named Djimytai Damour. The few moments that people were not in traffic or in line with their bags of stuff, there was the deadly chaos. The people who tripped over Djimytai’s body were called “savages” in the press. But we don’t ask ourselves about this absurdly violent environment. Thousands of cars and thousands of products, and short sprint in between.

Valley Stream actually was a wetlands, paved over. It was a valley’s stream. It still is a stream. The cars and products are a flimsy toxic veneer on top of rich ecosystem that waits for the absurd surface to collapse on itself, rust and crack and melt. We have a momentary economy that puts off its death with every sale.

We pray to that watery earth beneath us. Teach us to slow down between the cars and the shopping, so we can see Dyimytai standing there in the doorway. Teach us to slow down to a walk. We are made of water ourselves. When we walk we make waves and if we stop the driving and shopping, we feel the water, waiting.