TOMORROW IS THE DAY OF THE DEAD

AND MAYBE NOT JUST IN MEXICO

Bush Will Win If You Don't Vote!
(Scary, Hunh?)

Manana, Mexican children will be eating sugar skulls, and cakes decorated with bones of icing. Their parents will go to the graveyard, with favorite foods, flowers, and tequila for their beloved dead. Say what you will about the Mexicans, they are straight shooters. Maybe it's that Aztec thing. No "All Souls" or "All Hallows" Days for them.

The attitude toward death reflected in this Mexican holiday is reminiscent of, and possibly related to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (once celebrated from Ireland to Italy, from Bohemia to Spain) when the world begins to die each year, which is also a day for the dead. Not the "Dearly Beloved," not the "Dear Departed," not the "Loved One." The dead. It is the day when spirits walk the Earth, and, hopefully, pass on to the next world. The day when the doors between the Realms are left open, that life and death may recognize one another, through the portals.

I recognize the dead of these last four years. My cousins and my friends, my neighbours and my favorite shopgirls, and the thousands of strangers who all once inhabited the buildings at what is now a great, gaping hole at Liberty Street and Church Street, in Lower Manhattan. May God rest their souls, as my Irish grandmother used to say.

I recognize the strangers in faraway lands, with whom I had no quarrel. The innocents, in what was once the solitude of Afghanistan. The warriors, on every side, who died with hot blood in their mouths, believing they were martyrs for God, or country, or something.

I recognize the one hundred thousand women and children of Iraq, killed by our finest weapons, by accident... I recognize their angry, heart-broken sons and husbands, fathers and brothers, who died to avenge them, because they do not believe in accidents...

I recognize the Marines and soldiers, fighting for their lives, and dying in a place where they know they do not belong. I recognize their sisters and their mothers, their daughters and their wives, lost to them, forever.

I recognize the twilight of an evil time in America, when men without conscience ruled the world, and were cast down by the highest and the humblest among us, wielding only their votes. I recognize many of them for their courage in going to the very polls their own fathers feared to enter, still flanked by hostile white men, some with guns, and daring to cast a ballot.

I recognize that, on the Day of the Dead, we recognize the good, and cast out the evil, and make ourselves whole again.

In the name of the beloved dead, take the democratic sacrament tomorrow: Vote.



Mexicans Cheer Day of the Dead with Food, Flowers

A Mexican Feast for Bodies and Souls (great pic's)

Samhain

Celts

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