I don’t shop on Black Friday. I just don’t do it. I have zero desire to shop any other day of the year, and why on Earth would I want to do so on the one day of the year people seem to find it perfectly acceptable to lose all sense of civility?

The internet has been buzzing about the Long Island Wal-Mart death story. One Wal-Mart employee was killed, and four shoppers were injured, including one woman who is eight months pregnant. To sum up how horrible these people were:

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.

“They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.

“They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,” Overby said.

Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.

Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.

Even as officers were trying to save his life, these shoppers out to get a good deal couldn’t be bothered to wait a few minutes. Oh, no — they just charged right in and stepped on them if they were in the way.

Now, I know that this story is an anomaly in that someone actually died. But people act like this every year on Black Friday. They wait pre-dawn for hours to get the “early bird” sales and then as soon as the doors are opened they stampede their way in. These Black Friday stories happen every year. If there’s some new game system out, or the hot new toy for the kiddies, then you can bet your ass that greedy customers will be swarming the stores trying to gobble them up. Not only do they stampede, but they get in fistfights and shoving matches, they rip merchandise out of each other’s hands, and there are almost always injuries of some kind. Remember Tickle Me Elmos and Furbys?

This is not a new craze. This is something that has been over 10 years in the making, every year becoming a little worse until now, when apparently trampling someone to death is not a good enough reason to maybe calm down a bit and bring a halt to your precious deal-finding. It’s something I’ve never entirely been able to understand. Why are we this greedy? Why are we this self-absorbed? I’m sure many of these people will tell sob stories about how their children are just dying to get the newest Hannah Montana doll or the new Guitar Hero game, and they just have to give it to them for Christmas because if they don’t, little Susie will just be devastated!

Well, I’m pretty sure that’s a load of bullshit.

What happens on Black Fridays every year is not something that parents do out of selflessness and love for their children. More than anything, I think it’s about the competition and the adrenaline rush, about knowing that you beat all the other people out there trying to get those GREAT deals. Meanwhile, the media just gobbles it all up and covers it like they cover Britney Spears’ latest meltdown or Angelina Jolie’s newest kid. It’s sad, and it says a lot about where we are right now as a country, about our mindset. Many of us have forgotten the Golden Rule, many of us have forgotten simple things like common courtesy and respect for others, and we’ve become a self-absorbed nation where it’s everyone for themselves.

Black Friday is just a symptom for a much bigger disease.