Events | A Dark Thanksgiving

It is again that time of the year. It starts from the last Thursday of November when the US celebrates Thanksgiving which marks the apotheosis of consumerist culture, culminating in Christmas, now known as holiday season, when the festival of lights turns into the shopping malls pseudocomforting bright cheap hallways.

Somehow my personal situation is a mirror of the socio-political context: darkness and anxiety lead to the fear of losing control of basic rights. My divorce is horrific, constellated by encounters with human nature at its lowest, dominated by greed, narcissism, deception,mental cruelty: my husband, his family and their money. They have been so powerful to even buy my daughters. 

Uncannily even the usually cheerful balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving parade have a gloomy. dark appearance. Signs of the times?

However there a few things I can be thankful for: a relative good health, resilience, and the means of reinventing my life. finding new friends and meaningful relationships. Perhaps it is just the darkness of the night to give the balloons a gloomy appearance and tomorrow sunlight will cherish the usual yearly extravaganza.

events | Shopping Is the Opium of the People

 

Karl Marx wrote in 1843 "Religion is the opium of the people" ("Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes"). This statement became paraphrased in many forms including the popular “Sport is the opium of the people”. As the holidays approach, a paraphrase Karl would not object to, is  “shopping is the opium of the people". The beginning of the holiday season, is announced by the bombarding by countless ads in many form and format for black Friday and cyber Monday; it also marked by the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (started in 1924), which I cannot escape living a few blocks away from the balloon inflation and beginning of the parade. 

Cheering crowds start flowing in the neighborhood from the Wednesday afternoon; even this year, in spite of the economical crisis and Occupy Wall Street protest few miles away, the shopping and its celebration seems to be untouched in the hyperrealistic Macy’s parade, where inflated thirty-foot high balloons float (often face down) among the imponent Central Park West trees and buildings. The inflated balloons, are quite a metaphor for the current economy but hopefully will not burst in the crowds.