Scary Pumpkins, Pretty Masks

All of us who feel a strong kinship with Mother Earth experience a strange attraction to this time of year.

True, summer is ending (and what a glorious summer it was), but, along with bird and beast, flower and tree, we intuit the coming darkness, which precedes the dawn of rebirth.

For us, it is somehow a comforting dusk. It is a time to harvest, gather stores for winter, to rediscover our selves, our hearth and home.

In a spiritual sense, it is also a time for celebration. (But then, among us born-again pagans, when is it not a time for celebration?) For now, as fall deepens and winter beckons, the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is at its sheerest point. The ideal time to examine the connection between life and death, to revel in the unknown.

Hail Halloween!

Alas, all is not well this Halloween. Real estate developers and land speculators carve up northwest Washington like a madman clutching a ragged paring knife unleashed on a giant, juicy pumpkin. The madman cares not what face emerges on this Jack-O’-Lantern-O’-Greed. He’d just as soon slice and slash away till nothing remained of the pumpkin at all, his voracious hands dripping with pumpkin guts while he disembowels the once brimming gourd.

What face indeed will survive this unholy disfigurement of our land? Can we stay the slashing hand of the developers and speculators soon enough that our Halloween pumpkin might yet show forth a lovingly crafted friendly (or even fiendly) face lit with a glowing candle to warm us in the growing darkness?

Or will we residents of Whatcom County awake next Spring to find a rotting carcass of a pumpkin smashed on our doorstep, with nary a seed left for planting?

These are scary times indeed.

All manner of ghosts and goblins are afoot these days.

Here come Dubya and Dumsfeld trotting up the driveway to our door, howling “Trick or treat!” as they hold out their goody bags, salivating wildly as we willingly hand over our tax dollars, wilderness lands and civil liberties. But who can resist such darling costumes? Behold the “Simpsons” motif: Dubya as Mr. Burns, and Dumsfeld lovingly cowering at his feet as Smithers!

And look, here comes that adorable Rush Limbaugh all dolled up as ESPN’s latest football “analyst.” Don’t he look cute in that little helmet? But what’s he supposed to be? A drawback? A throwback? A far-right tight end? And what’s next? If a negativistic fascist buffoon like Lamejaw can become a sports analyst simply because he has a good voice, will CNN make Saddam Hussein its next Hollywood feature reporter because he gives good video? Will Osama Bin Laden star on the new ABC soap opera “Many Lives to Give,” because it’s impossible to tell whether he’s alive from one week to the next?

Ghouls at every turn of the road!

Yes, the veil between the spiritual and physical world is exceedingly thin right now.

In Alabama, right-wing pseudo-Christian zealots parade around in garb of heroes. “Let us bring God back into our government and schools!” they wail self-righteously. Whose God? Why, theirs, of course. The God that tells us we’re sinful and stupid and better believe in Him (and His ministers and priests, naturally) or we’re going straight to hell. The God who tells his believers to ostracize, belittle and strike down the non-believers, the evil-thinkers, the infidels.

No doubt the same God who masquerades as the Allah of militant fundamentalist Moslems.

Masks, masks everywhere this time of year!

Those who attempt to impose their religion on others seek to mask the imposition as “freedom of religion.” They paint women’s reproductive health clinics as “abortion” clinics, and feel it is their holy duty to gun down those who try to help women in their hour of deepest need.

Those who wish only to stuff their pockets with as much money and as many politicians as possible, prance around dressed up as “free enterprise entrepreneurs.” They paint trees, water, air, the very Earth Herself as “renewable resources,” and blithely assure us that their cancerous obsession with building is merely “progress.”

Outright invasion masquerades as justifiable war; occupation masquerades as nation building. And our brave fighting men and women sit and wait while Burns and Smithers demand that the former allies we so berated and outright defied—indeed, even the very people we invaded!—help us out of this mess. There was no justification, no plan; simply a lust for oil and revenge.

Meanwhile, most of us sit idly by, beguiled by the pretty masks.

But, take heart, ye carvers of pumpkins, donners of costumes, gobblers of candy. Take heart, celebrate life, rejoice in things both known and unknown. Use this time of the thin veil to become aware, to reach out to others, to light candles in the growing dark.

Have some fun. Spread some truth.

That scares the hell out of the bad guys. §