David McElroy

I wasn’t out shopping when stores opened for “Black Friday” sales Thursday evening, and I won’t be shopping Friday. I’m uncomfortable with the out-of-control consumerism of our culture — which I’ve written about before — but I don’t care if that’s what you want. The choices you make about material things reflect your values, not mine.

There seem to be increasingly sharp battle lines between those who want to tell you when you should be allowed to shop and those who are eager to get the best deals available. Many people have been angry for a long time that so many people turn the day after Thanksgiving into an orgy of commercialism, but they’re really upset now that stores are opening earlier and earlier — bringing opening times all the way up to 8 p.m. Thursday at Walmart and 9 p.m. at Target. Other stores are opening at similarly early times.

For millions of people, this is a good thing. They wouldn’t line up as they do if they didn’t want to shop. And the random Thanksgiving night shoppers I talked to were thrilled. They said they had long been accustomed to getting up very early Friday morning, and they appreciated being able to do the same shopping Thursday night instead. The folks I talked with at the Target near my house Thursday night seemed like very happy customers.

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One of the key story points in “The Wizard of Oz” is that a magical man with all powers ruled the entire land from the Emerald City and could grant whatever he chose to give out of the goodness of his heart. Some people believe the same of the U.S. president.

The Ohio State Buckeyes are 11-0 right now, with just one game to go. Ohio State’s group of football fans is as rabid as any of the other top 15 or 20 college football programs, and they would normally be excited about a possible chance to play for the national championship. There’s just one problem. The Buckeyes are on probation this year and are ineligible to play a post-season game. That was part of the punishment they suffered because of a cheating scandal a few years back.

Now, I understand that a sane person would wonder how these two stories are going to tie together. But even though the ruling body of college football — the NCAA — has judged Ohio State guilty and handed down the sanctions, some of the school’s fans are unhappy. They don’t think it’s fair. So they actually started a petition on the White House website asking Barack Obama to intervene — and somehow declare that Ohio State must be allowed to play for the national title. Here’s what the petition said:

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Most people seem to have very strong feelings about who’s right in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, despite knowing remarkably little about the history surrounding it. Do the details of the Middle East conflicts make your eyes glaze over, because you’ve heard the same stories over and over again? The Onion had a classic article five years ago making the point that these news articles are basically interchangeable as far as Americans are concerned.

As the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians flares up yet again, so are tensions between supporters of the two sides. On Facebook, it’s been pretty heated. When I read the comments from partisans on both sides, you’d think that each side was reading only half of the news and facts from the Middle East — and the other side was reading only the other half of the news and facts.

You can almost take much of their rhetoric (from both sides) and switch it to the other side by changing the names. The cheerleaders for the two sides don’t seem to understand that it’s a complex dispute with fault on both sides, not something that can easily be reduced to a tale of heroes and villains.

I’ve been surprised in the last few days to get questions from people who really don’t know that much about the dispute, people who hear both sides screaming at each other and don’t know what to believe. As a result, I’d like to take a quick look at some of the basic facts of the conflict and show you why I don’t see either side as “good.”

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