Celebration

We are in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, this holiday season. Here, everything is a celebration and it goes on for days, until the next special occasion. There are parades, fireworks, music everywhere, and smiling, laughing people of multiple generations participating.

In our world today, there is widespread poverty and misery everywhere. Manipulation, cheating, lying, and greed caused this worldwide. There are no mortgages in Mexico so the problems here are not caused by bank scams and Wall Street scams and corporate greed. Here it’s archaic laws among other things. Whatever the reason, poverty is poverty and misery is misery.

Why here in San Miguel, the smiling faces and the celebrations of epic proportions? Partly it’s the resilience of the people and most working class Mexicans we have met over many years are “old souls”.

Celebrations are an affirmation of life and that is very powerful here, as is family solidarity. They spend weekly time together often live together and share what they have.

During World War II, we know that the United States considered celebrations for Americans, in and out of uniform, to be morale boosters and they were given top priority. This has been true since the beginning of civilization; all kinds of celebrations for all kinds of reasons.

So we celebrate being alive, having enough to eat and a place to sleep. We celebrate each other and connection, the Internet, community, family and friends. We celebrate the people who say, “No. We want better, the people who died for civil rights, women’s rights, ending unjust wars and the other hard won rights.

It’s an endless list of causes for which people have sacrificed out of a belief in their rightness, always. May it be so forever, We celebrate the good people everywhere who try and say no to power, when it is abused.

We celebrate Twitter and the people we follow and the ones who follow us and read our blogs, and those we have yet to connect with. We celebrate the life force.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!

Oliver & Barbara

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