Suicide While Shopping

Here’s a new one: Commit suicide while shopping.

A man and his girlfriend in eastern China where shopping for five hours at a mall. He’d had enough and wanted to go home. She wanted to go into one more store that had a sale on shoes.

An eyewitness said, “He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes tha[n] she could wear in a lifetime and it was pointless buying more. She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.”

The man dropped the bags and jumped over the balcony. He fell seven stories, smashed Christmas decorations on the way down, bounced off the roof of a kiosk, and hit the floor, dead.

That’s a new level of reacting to excessive Christmas shopping. The insane commercialization of the season has met its match–at least in one instance.

We’d all ask what possessed the man to be driven to such a rash, fatal act. I’d also wonder about the exorbitant greed of the girlfriend, which is of course far too common.

Here’s where more of us really need to start reacting against the excessive materialism of the Christmas Season. Suicide is an ironic response that kills one person and hopefully jolts a lot of others awake.

Instead of killing ourselves, what could we do less of–and in the place of that do more of something meaningful and helpful?

Advent Conspiracy — see www.AdventConspiracy.org — is one of the best places to go for a good reaction and response. How can you cut down on spending and give more to those who need it? How can you cut down on busyness and give yourself more meaningfully to others?

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News and Photo credit:  Daily Mail Online (www.dailymail.co.uk)