GHOSTS

Samhain (or, Halloween or El Dia de los Muertos) approaches, and I'm thinking about spirits and ghosts. And while there are the spirits who seem to watch over us or vengeful ghosts who can scare us, the ones I'm thinking about today are those spirits of people who have been wronged.

Why would these ghosts linger and haunt?

Perhaps a ghost might be bound to a specific location by an event which happened at that place and it is unresolved. Maybe a person died by accident. Maybe they died in battle. Maybe they were murdered. Maybe they died of a broken heart. Maybe they lost their homes or their lives or their livelihood due to subterfuge. But they seem to be stuck in a place and a time – tied up by some lingering betrayal. With this in mind, then . . .

Why am I intrigued with this?

I guess maybe it's about noticing repetition or maybe patterns. Kind of like issues in our lives that repeat until they're resolved. Even on a national scale, issues come up over and over, and lately it's occurred to me that they are like ghosts rising up from our national past. For instance: the mistreatment of Native Americans manifested at Standing Rock when they protested the proposed building of the Dakota pipeline on Native lands, 2016; the subjugation of women which recently manifested in the Me Too Movement when the hashtag went viral in 2017, and the disregard and debasement of Black Americans, most horribly evident in the murder of George Floyd in 2020. These are contemporary examples of issues which have shadowed the U.S. since the beginning of the country. What might these events have in common? Where's the pattern? Injustice. The ghosts of these injustices persist, such that we can sometimes feel that life in the U.S. is like living in a haunted house.

Again and again, we're dealing with the ghosts of these three evils, genocide, patriarchy and slavery. And I'm suggesting that one way – perhaps the only way – to resolve the issues and release the ghosts, is to create justice for them. Which leads me to the last question:

Why can't we seem to do that – why is it so hard?