The events of the past week, the time straddling our uniquely American holiday we call Thanksgiving and two major religious holidays, were representative of all the elements that constitute our modern day news stories. They were grand (and not in a good way, they were just BIG;, they were all dramatic and they were all twisted together in the dark rope of ironic, head-shaking horror.

    Thanksgiving eve saw the unfolding of a three-day siege in Mumbai, India. in which 10 terrorists killed 170 people in 13 separate locations. The main thing the victims had in common was they were randomly chosen political targets, chosen by fate to be the brushstrokes of a quasi-political/religious group seeking to make a statement about how they want what they want when they want it and so they are going to take it by dying while trying.

  The lesson to take from this? There isn’t one; just don’t be in the wrong place at the right time or your life may be extinguished as a footnote to someone else’s desires and wishes.

  The day after Thanksgiving is a day we have given the especially cynical name Black Friday. It’s the day after the day in which we give thanks for all we have. We wake up early, still stuffed with  all we consumed in the spirit of thanksgiving and begin lining up to grab as much more as we can of things we likely don’t need all that much for as little as possible. Businesses offer once-in-a-lifetime sales on this day, and we all take the consumer-fish bait like a bunch of Nero-led Romans at an all-you-can eat buffet.

  And so when Black Friday came this year, the predictably horrific inevitable happened. More than 2,000 bargain-hunting shoppers who had camped outside a Long Island, N.Y. Wal-Mart since  9 p.m. couldn’t contain themselves any longer as the 5 a.m. opening neared, and they burst through the doors at 4:55 a.m. What this made a page one story that shocked and astonished as opposed to a page 12 story that made us chuckle in self-righteous recognition of other people’s – not us, certainly –  greed, was the fact that a Wal-Mart greeter, Idimytai Damour, was thrown to the floor and trampled in the stampede that charged over and around him.

  No one even stopped.

  While Damour died in another act of random violence, it was different from the Mumbai story in that it wasn’t  a  political statement per se, but it was a testament to the power of MORE!. Again the only lesson was don’t get in the way of self-centered greed.

   The third news story we heard, saw and read about was the arrest of the New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress for accidentally shooting himself in the thigh while entering a dance club two nights before  a game in which another football player, Sean Taylor, was to be honored (as an accomplished player) one year after he was shot to death in an apparent house robbery.

  Burress shot himself with his own Glock after being allowed by the dance club security guards to bypass the metal-detecting equipment the club sees necessary to keep patrons safe from each other. Burress, while offering up every imaginable excuse except  the fact he has trouble getting past safeties when he’s double-covered, could not be kept safe from himself.

  The lesson here? The same as the one in the other two stories that happened over the weekend. Sometimes we can be in the wrong place at the right time to be o the wrong end of a story. The difference with Burress is he made the self-centered choice to be in that story, he was not a victim like Damur or the 170 people who died n Mumbai. But given the fact the gun discharged in a crowded it could have been otherwise.

   These three events captured our attention at a time of year when we celebrate our families, our faith, our friends and our freedoms. We need to try and carry those feelings out into the world and lead by example. We need to be less self-centered, impatient and paranoid. Live free or die, indeed.