When does the greed-driven search for “bargains” and “steals” go too far over the line of decency? Wednesday’s eviction story written by Erin Randolph was the single best piece of reporting I have seen in the Daily all year. I for one would like to thank Randolph for bringing this story to the public light.

Clearly, the scavenger behavior points to a paradoxical “side-effect” of materialism taken to an extreme, to the point of an irrational need for excessive materialistic profit. Could this “buzzard-like” behavior be due to the pathological manifestations of the capitalism ideology in ISU students?

To put it bluntly, these “scavengers” were caught up in a state of hyper-consumerism in which people will take anything they can get solely because its free. This relentless search for “deals” and “steals” took primacy over all else, including a basic sense of respect for the lives of other human beings. This phenomenon was not a yard sale, it was the displacement of real human livelihoods right here in Ames, Iowa.

I congratulate Tyson Conrad and Katie Downs for their altruistic attempt to preserve at least some fragment of family history for the displaced evictees.

Have some students at Iowa State become so pathologically competitive that they can cold-heartedly navigate morality as a means to negotiate their own selfish ends? Further, what can be done to compensate the irreplaceable losses of the displaced eviction victims?

Paul Goodman

Junior

Sociology