America the Great...Consumer

Is it possible to avoid the excitement of Black Friday this year? Yesterday was either the beginning of a recovery for retail, or the beginning of the end of American consumerism as we know it. Someone ended up giving their life to satisfy the buy-crazy consumers of the state of New York. And yet, I find the blow-hard criticism of sites like Treehugger and others to be quite frankly self-righteous in their die-hard commitment to buy-nothing day. I know that the underpinnings of the failure of the US economy go much deeper than a few bad loans and people who are trying to live beyond their means, but for a site that publishes as many blog posts about neat new products as they do about environmental issues it seems a little hypocritical to be touting the benefits of reduced consumerism.
As sad as it is, America is a consumer machine. We are a country that upholds a standard of living that is impossible nearly anywhere else in the world, and the American dream is to strive towards that ideal. People who can't afford to live this way are looked down upon as failures within a system that offers infinite possibilities for upward mobility and so for those people that lined up outside of Walmart yesterday morning in New York they were simply trying to stay within the status quo and provide their families with as much of that American dream as they can.
I agree that our value system needs to be re-evaluated, but doing so from an elitist standpoint will fail to make the right transition. I don't honestly know what needs to be done, but it's worth a shot to look at things from other points of view instead of simply categorizing those people in New York as consumeristic animals who have no respect for human life. It's easy to blame others and contain it to a single incident, but this is representative of a much larger cultural phenomena and it would be relevant to take note that the Walmart incident could have happened anywhere, and how much different would it have appeared if it had taken place at a Nordstrom's instead. This story has so many racist and classist undertones that are not being acknowledged - we look down on those who cannot afford the things that are considered staples of American society, but when they take their opportunity to get those things we are appalled at the measures that they go to in order to fit into the mold. I don't know what else to say.