Hallow New Moon Edition November 2024
What spooks you? Gremlins, ghosts, and goblins? Things that go bump in the night? All Hallows Eve is supposed to be spooky, of course, but it’s hardly the only time of the year when the hair on the back of the neck tingles or queasiness unsettles the stomach. Every so often, it seems, something sends chills down the spine.
Our jack o’lantern fest derives from the ancient Celts some two thousand years ago who celebrated the end of summer and the harvest at Samhain (pronounced sow-in), a night when the dead walk among the living and from whom your disguise might hide you (HERE). Christianity, as it has done so cleverly in the Common Era, renamed and repurposed this and other pagan ceremonies for its own ends.
Halloween became the name of the night before All Hallows Day, when saints were celebrated and in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, the days soon grew shorter and darker. Better to be on the best of terms with the saints when the gloom settles in and the larder is depleting. Trick or treat began in the United Kingdom, where people went door to door asking for small breads in exchange for prayers. The custom came to the United States with Scotch and Irish immigrants in the 1800s (HERE). Boo!
Scary stuff comes in all sorts of packages, of course. The United States is a heartbeat from election day, which is frightening for nearly everyone who pays attention to such things. Years ago when we spent time in the nation’s capital, the advice was “if you want a friend in this town, get a dog.” A lot of people everywhere seem to have taken that advice, because there are dogs in every nook and cranny of our lives these days and ever fewer friends among us, especially in politics.
Political operatives likely have always seen theirs as a blood sport. What seems to have changed over time is the blood lust of the political parties themselves and the people they represent. Discourse is so yesterday, opinion so dangerous, unless of course you preach only to the choir. Cross the aisle at your own risk and only if you’re looking for a fight. There’s nothing else to be accomplished. The residents of red and blue each are too deeply dug in. Policy now is what used to be called getting even.
One wonders if and how it will ever change. Whatever else might be said about it, there is clearly deep unhappiness and lives lived fearfully in the Greatest Nation on Earth. We have to question why? What is the source of this disquiet in our country that breeds the staunch posture of intolerance, incivility, and disrespect, which has become the way we are as a society. We don’t know the answer but we do know it’s pretty damned scary. Boo hoo!!
When we are truly afraid, when we believe the only way to deal with some people is to “assimilate” them, which in this case means destroy their languages, cultures, homes, communities, families, their very lives, we act in ways we rationalize for a long time, and when that ceases to be viable, we ignore or deny to the point of pretending it never happened, that is a deep-seated fear.
Carlisle Indian School, which became the model for such places the U.S. Department of the Interior proliferated, operated under the simple principle: “kill the Indian and save the Man.” How many were “saved” is open to question, but it is finally coming to light and grudgingly acknowledged that many, many were killed.
So it is a point of contrition and a long overdue statement of culpability by the United States of America that on the 25th of October this year, President Joe Biden officially apologized on our behalf for the boarding schools where native children were abused, molested, and killed (HERE). It’s a critically important step in coming to terms with the horrors this nation inflicted on the Indigenous peoples we subjugated and tried to destroy. Perhaps now we can begin finding a way toward reparations. Boo-ya!!!