Friday, October 30, 2009

Global Culture - Halloween - Day of the Dead


There are traditions that transcend cultures. There are traditions that are adopted. There are traditions that get recycled through time.

The ancient Celtic New Year used to fall on November the first. There are ancient Celtic customs related to the harvest and coinciding with this date.

A Celtic celebration called Samhain used to center around the building of a bonfire on the Celtic New Year’s Eve on October 31. The people of a village would extinguish all fires in the village and take fire from the community bonfire to bring a new light from fire into the new year.

With the Celtic or Irish disaspora to America in the middle of the nineteenth century came the tradition of dressing up on Halloween first in religious costumes and later in monster chic.

The Brits, who have been greatly Americanized in these past decades, have found and adopted the “American” (Irish American) custom of Halloween and trick or treat. Many purists over there are disturbed that their traditional harvest festival bonfire thing on November 5 of Guy Fawkes Day has somehow been corrupted by yet another thing American.

Which came first? The religious holidays of All Saints day on November 1st and All Souls day on November 2 or the ancient pagan rituals associated with the Celtic New Year.

As in a grinding merger of cultures, it is hard to tell the truth of any given custom or tradition. In a way, globalization and driving toward a global culture have been ongoing for millennium.

I think we have the Celts first and then the Christian era trying to dominate and own dates on a calendar.

People of the Meso-American cultures of Mexico and Central America have their Dia de los Muertos – Day of the Dead customs around November 1 and 2. November 1 is for memory of babies and small children – angels – saints. November 2 is for memory of dead adult relatives - souls.

While the symbols of this holiday and its festivities are far from the Victorian or Puritanical customs of mourning, Meso-American culture treats respect and memory of the dead along with the needs and celebrations of the living. Families meet, clean up a relative’s gravesite, have a picnic there, tell family stories or even keep vigil through the night with candles and musica.

The human skull as symbol of death is not a feared symbol but a reminder of death which is part of a cycle of life perspective. The skull in Meso-American culture had been around for centuries before the Spanish and their imposed religion. In many ways I think that western culture and or Christian culture is a culture that greatly fears death and has great self-doubts about its mission statement. The conquered give lip service to their new masters and ancient customs such as Dia de los Muertos and Halloween go on and on.

I have spent the last thirty odd years practicing my own form of pagan respect, not ancestor worship. I light a candle before sunset on Halloween in honor of the Samhain custom and help the New Year in with new light. I also light a candle in my home on November 2 to remember long gone friends and relatives. I also in true Irish tradition and variation thereof have a shot or two of tequila in their honor.





Child Abuse Judges Conahan & Ciavarella Indicted – RICO Act


It says something very tragic about our country when crimes against children get so little attention.

I had to go to the British Newspaper website Guardian UK World this morning to see that all the juvenile cases ruled on by the so-called judges Ciavarella and Conahan have been overturned – finally.

Pennsylvania high court dismisses thousands of juvenile convictions

There is no news article of this on the Google News Summary page or on the CNN website.

WHY?

Why was this story only treated as a regional story and only covered by one or two upstate newspapers? The New York Times covered it in a few articles. Why didn’t this become a national story – a national scandal - in the MSM??? Don’t poor children victimized in Pennsylvania count as human beings anymore? Where was the national moral outrage? Out to lunch I guess.

In case any of you missed the original story – enjoy:

Wilkes-Barre judges accused of jailing kids for cash

The money making scheme to shut down tax payer juvenile detention centers in favor of for profit juvenile jails in upstate Pennsylvania has gotten very little press as far as I am concerned. To his credit film maker Michael Moore made mention of it in his last movie. Other than that you have to have run into the story or been touched by it as a victim to know about it.

These two fiends Ciavarella and Conahan started sentencing kids to minimum ninety day sentences for minor offenses, first time offenses or even truancy, things that would not have been touched when the taxpayer juvenile facilities were still in existence.

You get a for profit prison system and you have to fill it with “criminals”. With something straight out of Dickens, these judges got kickbacks from the for profit prison for supplying them bodies to imprison. The judges pocketed millions. Parents got billed $150 a day for use of the prison space by their children and liens got put on the parent’s property. Hey its for profit! The taxpayers are saving money. Win-Win. Geez.

I harassed former Bishop Martino of Scranton, before his nervous breakdown, in one or two of my blogs about how he never publicly condemned this atrocity of justice in his moral bailiwick. He had all the time in the world to condemn abortion but no time to condemn two good Catholic judges under his jurisdiction for a new form of child abuse. But hey, he is a bishop, and that sort of stuff ain’t really a crime – is it?

To make a long story short these two judicial pigs pleaded guilty to tax evasion to the Feds and got a white crime conviction sentence of a few years in a country club prison under the Bush Department of Justice.

Backtracking today on the news of the overturning of all their sentences I see that they have been indicted by a grand jury on RICO racketeering charges and I hope they rot in prison.

Conahan and Ciavarella indicted by federal grand jury

I should applaud the Feds for coming through for validating the judicial system here that failed so miserably under Bush. Thank the Almighty, the present Department of Justice in Washington is not now being run by the neocons or graduates of “Christian” universities in these new days of political change.

Now if I start talking about the victims, the children, I will be called a flaming bleeding heart liberal.

What really pisses me off is how the MSM failed with a capital “F” in ignoring this “property” story. When capitalism commits an atrocity it is no crime. Capitalism is the one true religion of our ruling elites these days.

As far as I am concerned regarding Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, these two bastards should be taken out into a public square in Wilkes-Barre and strung up by their balls!
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