In the great new culture war over Thanksgiving shopping, I’m neutral

By David McElroy · November 28, 2013

If you want to start a fight on this Thanksgiving day, tell someone that you’re going shopping this afternoon. Or tell people who are planning to shop this afternoon that should stay home instead of shopping.

In a debate such as this, there’s remarkably little room for facts or logic or even courtesy. There tends to simply be a lot of anger about people who come to different conclusions — about something as mundane as shopping.

Since there’s so much sniping about holiday shopping — from angry people on various sides — here’s my official notice of neutrality. If you want to shop on Friday (or on Thanksgiving day), I don’t care one way or the other. If you want to get into line and wait in cold and rain for days, that’s fine, too. I don’t understand it and I might make fun of you, but I don’t care.

On the other hand, if you’re angry and offended at people doing those things, I’m not going to join you, even though I find their shopping behavior odd and obsessive, too.

I’m not angry or offended at either side in this ridiculous culture war. I just don’t care what decisions people make for themselves — such as when they work or shop — about something that’s so trivial to me. I’ll just be enjoying my turkey and dressing while others argue about this.

When I was in high school in a small town, almost none of the stores were open on Sundays. There were a few convenience stores and gas stations. And there were some restaurants. But grocery stores and other major shopping was closed.

It was a legacy of the blue laws in the state. In many places around the country, various forms of such laws still exist. At one time, business couldn’t generally be conducted on Sunday in many places, because it violated religious notions about working on the Sabbath. (We’ll ignore the whole question about whether the Sabbath should have been on Saturday anyway.) But for the most part, stores were closed on Sunday, simply because many people believed it was wrong. And their belief that it was wrong was forced on other people.

Today, Thanksgiving shopping is illegal in Rhode Island, Maine and Massachusetts. Yes, seriously. These laws make no more sense today than the Sunday blue laws made in Jasper, Ala., when I was a teen-ager. In both cases, it’s a matter of some people trying to force their views about what’s right on other people.

As far as I know, I don’t need anything from a store today. I certainly won’t be lining up for “door-buster” sales. I’m disdainful of the materialism that I associate with this sort of shopping madness. But I respect the freedom of other people to disagree with me. I respect the right of workers to decide for themselves whether they want to work for companies that are open on Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever.

When I was in the newspaper business, we worked on holidays. Somehow, it didn’t destroy me. And if I think of something I want from the store this evening, I’m glad I have that option.

If you don’t want to shop on Thanksgiving or Black Friday or any other random day, then don’t. It’s as simple as that. But don’t tell other people what’s right for them.

I suggest you opt out of the fight over this. I certainly have. Just do what you want and leave everybody else to do as they please. Your life will be less stressful if you’ll quit worrying about whether you approve of the way other people live, work or shop.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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