David McElroy

I was out getting my mail one day not long ago when I noticed several of my neighbors in the street talking. I stepped across the street to be neighborly and see what the neighborhood gossip might be.

“Hey, let me tell you about the new idea we’ve been talking about,” said Karl. He’s sort of the intellectual in our neighborhood. I’m not sure what he does, but he spends a lot of time at the library working on a book. “We’ve decided that we need a neighborhood swimming pool for our street. I figure we can have it ready to go by the time it’s warm enough in the spring.”

“Sounds great, Karl,” I said, “but wouldn’t that be pretty expensive?”

“None of us can afford it alone,” Karl said, “but if we put our resources together, it shouldn’t be so bad.”

The other folks all seemed to think it was a good idea, so I told him I might be interested if the price was right. They told me they’d let me know what they figured out, and I went back home.

A few days later, there was a knock at my door. It was Karl and a couple of his friends.

“I have great news,” Karl said. “We took a vote and decided to move ahead with the community swimming pool project. We’ll be letting you know how much you owe as soon as we have the figures all put together. Isn’t that great?”

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“I need to show you something.”

That’s what I heard as a friend came to sit down where I was eating. She sounded serious, but I didn’t know what might be going on.

She looked around to be sure nobody was watching. Then she held her arm close to her body to shield it from other people and then turned the arm over. I saw several small cut marks. It was shocking to see, even though there weren’t nearly as many cuts as shown in the picture above.

I knew that my friend had been having problems and needed counseling. I knew she had done minor cutting earlier in her teen-age years. I even knew she had been having more problems lately. But I didn’t know she was feeling like doing this again. I asked her why she was doing it.

“I wanted to feel something,” she said.

I’ve read a lot about cutting in an effort to understand it. I’ve encountered it before — all in teen-age girls — and everyone I’ve seen it affect has seemed to get over it in time, usually with good counseling. From everything I’ve read and the few I’ve talked with who’ve been affected by it, it seems that the people who go through this have been experiencing intense, out-of-control emotions. They seem to have repressed the intensity of the hurtful emotions they feel so much that they end up numb.

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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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