Gluttony and Greed: Happy Thanksgiving!

This is the holiday weekend that give me the most personal angst of them all. Today we celebrate Gluttony and tomorrow its twin sister Greed makes her best appearance of the year. This is the one weekend of the year I wish I could resign my membership in American society.

Under the guise of a day of thankfulness, we Americans will gorge ourselves on a dead bird and all of the produce our already swollen stomachs can hold. We will waddle away from our feeding trough, sit down and loosen our belt or the top button on our trousers. We will brag about how much we ate and how miserable we are as a result of the over indulgence. Overeating on this day has become an acceptable sin for our culture. Even homeless people and indigents have more than they can eat on this day thanks to Frank Veltri and many church and service organizations. It is a celebration of excess.

Of course, there is football. For me that is the one thing that makes this day tolerable. It is an escape for me, but I know that some despise the sport. And I can understand why: as someone once said football is a demonstration of humanity's two greatest evils: Violence punctuated by committee meetings.

Then tomorrow, at the crack of dawn and even before, people will play their parts in act two of the G&G drama as they attack the shelves at WalMart, Target and virtually every other retail store in America to save a few bucks on Christmas gifts, mostly for their already spoiled rotten kids. I've never participated in this madness and I never will, but I know people who do and the bloodlust they exhibit over this event is downright scary and barbaric. Then at 6 & 11 tomorrow evening, the TV news reporters will show us moving pictures of the melees and especially highlighting the places where fist fights broke out in places that had too few Barbie dolls and too many greedy customers. It really is too, too much.

I find myself, even while I write this post, becoming physically ill at the prospect of what I know will happen in the next 24 hours. God help us.