If this is being British, you can count me out!

The spectacle of crowds of frenzied shoppers fighting each other at the "Black Friday" shopping sales is enough to make anyone cringe. It is in fact, a beautiful example of what has become of certain sections of our 'Great' Britain.
Okay, so not everyone is willing to crush a granny or trample a child to get their hands on a flat screen TV. But nevertheless, the spectacle does tell us something significant about where we have gone in the UK.
It is symptomatic of a crisis that is afflicting so many people. An emptiness to who they are, what they feel and what they aspire to. Of course there's nothing wrong in buying a TV, but to be willing to go to these lengths of borderline violence for the sake of saving a few pounds......we have to ask ourselves what has gone wrong. Surely this is not the Great Britain that the politicians like to talk about in their speeches! Hopefully not, anyway.

I remember when I returned to live in London after an 11 year absence in Japan, noticing how much more materialistic British society had become. It seemed that if couples or families owned less than two houses and had less than one car per person, they considered themselves on the breadline. This was back in 2008 before the 'crash',  but things have not changed for the better. If anything, they've just become more desperate, as we have seen on the appropriately named 'Black Friday'.

I have to say, it is not a good advertisement for the United Kingdom, and I'm not personally convinced that such scenes would be possible in some of the European countries that we seem to love to hate over here (and blame, by the way)!

Perhaps it is an opportunity for reflection.Why have people become so desperately materialistic? Who is responsible? Are these the values we REALLY aspire to?

The point is that such behaviour as we have seen in these instances represents the antithesis of what prosperity REALLY means.There is a very powerful 'poverty mindset' that drives this kind of desperation. We may aim to create a society of plenty, but when we see people willing to sacrifice dignity and values for these shiny things, we can be certain that we are not moving towards true prosperity.