We’ve become a society infected with impatience.

And that impatience even turned deadly last Friday at the Walmart in Valley Stream, N.Y., where a temporary worker was trampled to death by a herd of wild shoppers who figured they’d waited long enough to get in the store. Some people won’t stand in a line more than a dozen people long to cast a ballot but they’ll camp out all night on a sidewalk just to grab a bargain.

What happened to that Walmart employee was a category of homicide called “depraved indifference.” Or in this sad case, depraved impatience.

We...

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