Intercoms, Wal-Mart, and rope. (Some assembly required.)

I was trying to ignore a Philadelphia area incident which a Wal-Mart customer managed to get on the store’s intercom and make the following “announcement“:

“All black people leave the store now.”

Observed a friend who emailed me the ink:

How hateful! My god, what a blubbering, humorless cry-baby mentality. I wonder what would have happened if some black woman had done this, asking all white people to leave? Answer: we wouldn’t have heard about it.

I said that if I had been in the store and heard someone tell all white people to leave, I would have laughed (probably all the way home to write a blog post…)
What I find really scary is that anyone would be so stupid as to imagine that Wal-Mart would deliberately make such an announcement. (Seriously, people were talking about boycotting Wal-Mart over this.)
The incident illustrates how shockingly easy it is for bored pranksters to start a huge amount of trouble. A mere piece of rope fashioned into a noose and hung brattily from a tree in the park can cause absolute chaos. (I’m glad I’m a 55-year-old brat and not a 13-year-old brat!)
And Wal-Mart sells rope, does it not? Didn’t Lenin predict something like this?