In Mexico and the southwestern U. S., the day after All Saints' Day is Dia de los Muertos.
La Catrina is the reigning queen of Dias de los Muertos, the Mexican fiesta honoring the dead. Finely dressed in an upper-class Victorian style, an oversized, feathered and flowered hat perched primly on her skull, elegant but skeletal, La Catrina was popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada in his political lampoons of the corrupt regime of Porfirio Díaz. Her role, then and now, is simple: She reminds us that rich or poor, famed or unknown, we all eventually become skeletons.
Until August 29, 2005, Beach Boulevard in Hancock County, Mississippi, was populated with mansions and upscale camps from its western end, past Waveland, to its northeastern end in Bay St. Louis, where the Yacht Club was located. Those are all gone now, smashed to rubble and swept out to sea. As one of the owners said recently with a sense of irony, "the 'haves' are now the 'have nots'."
I read somewhere that Hurricane Katrina was the great leveler, metaphorically as well as physically. Money did not spare anyone from Katrina's wrath. Those with financial means may have been able to fend off some of the worst effects of the hurricane, but that may end up being merely a postponement. Many evacuees immediately bought new residences in new towns in an attempt to hurry up and get "back to normal". However, they still own their houses that were destroyed or seriously damaged but for which they continue to owe mortgage payments. In addition, they are still going to have to deal with the lingering physical and emotional impact, which may not show up until later. This may include health problems, marital difficulties, PTSD, job instability, and the effects of trauma experienced by their children.
If there is any constant in life, it is change. Nothing is permanent, nothing stays the same, nothing lasts. Ever. Not our bodies, nor our jobs, our relationships, the communities we live in, our religious institutions, or our nations.
I wonder how having money has enabled us to avoid facing our ultimate lack of control over the impermanence of all things, as well as the implications of the fact that we are here together on this planet. Our fates, our lives are inescapably connected and getting more so by the minute. What other people do affects us, and we cannot control what they do.
We have been using money to substitute for being truly present to each other and to our own lives. This is true on both the personal as well as the sociopolitical level. If I have the financial means, I can insulate myself from having to engage in the "give-and-take" of being in the world in conjunction with other imperfect humans. I can isolate within my own home and my own mind and limit myself to what is presented to me as "real life' in the media, as filtered through my own belief system. I can pretend that I am in control. Because Americans in particular live far beyond their actual means, we have gone seriously into debt (I mean that economically, but I think it applies spiritually as well) in an avoidance of the realities of life.
I think time just ran out on that one.
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