Black Sunday
Black Sunday
By A.J. RUSSO, Ph.D.
Some watched in horror as they turned and glared into the eyes of the frenzied. A stampede was about to begin and it looked like only the strongest would survive. People in the crowd had never seen anything like it. Words were exchanged as time clicked down. Who would win, they all thought?
As time expired and the anticipation was over, the crowd rushed with abandon‹it was chaos. Several people were knocked to the ground, others scurried for safety, but most were focused on their frenzied objective.
You might be wondering who and where. In fact, when fans in the stands, particularly those in the “nose bleed” sections who were at the Ravens, Redskins Sunday night match-up at M&T Bank Stadium, read this, they will probably think the story is about them. And they could be right. More about that later. But actually, the story above occurred in a mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. on “Black” Friday. Yes, the most important shopping day of the year.
Unfortunately, in the mall story, a Wal-Mart worker died, and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured, after an “out-of-control” mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store’s front doors and trampled them all.
One of the other employees at the mall said, right after the early morning incident, “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.”
A cop at the scene said, “Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by shoppers who were streaming inside.”
At the football game, up in the crowded “cheap seats” (written sarcastically, because there are no cheap seats at M&T), a similar incident-frenzied crowds of opposing fans, shouting obscenities at one another. Then as the clock ticked and time ran down, a push, then a shove and, before the rest of the crowd could yell, what the …. , people all around were being pushed, kicked and trampled.
Thank goodness no one was killed at the stadium.
Isn’t it ironic how we abhor the behavior of the stampeding N.Y. shoppers, but sometimes accept the drunken behavior of friends and fans at the stadium?
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