Boy was it sad when we walked into Lowes Home Improvement in mid-July and collided with Halloween, which isn’t until October 31st. Three and one-half months early. So much for Christmas in July. Or Summer. Or Fall. Workers at Home Depot say they will be launching early-August. Costco has theirs out at the same time. Universal Studios is saturating the video-waves with horror night ghouls to come.
Americans will be confronted with this one-night holiday for one-fourth of their entire year.
Traditional celebrations are core aspects of all cultures. They provide emotional outlet, and a feeling of connection, meaning and purpose. Holidays are a reflection of a society’s shared values, historical milestones, and unique traditions. They have much to do with the culture’s identity. They have a rhythm and occur at different times during the year with spaces in between within which ordinary daily life takes place, enabling people to enjoy a holiday, reflect upon it for a time, and spend time looking forward to the next. Holidays express traditions and practices that have grow up in the community and been accepted and developed over generations among the people comprising the national family. They provide rhythm, anticipation, expectation and a sense of community which people expect and look forward to across the rhythm of the year. They are part of a society’s glue.
That glue is dissolved when the holiday trappings are not focused around the traditional holiday period but are pushed for sale over long periods of time.
In this writer’s opinion rolling out Halloween merchandise in mid-July is not a healthy practice showing consideration of our national family’s needs, culture, and health.
It seems this is what always comes to be from hedge-fund driven mega-enterprises. It shows they do not share the same values and rhythm of life.
I read in recent years that Lowe's was pushed by hedge fund investors to increase revenue based on satellite imagery of its parking lots compared to Home Depot. I do not know what percent of Lowe's stock or operations are controlled or influenced by hedge funds. Or the others big-guys rolling it out for one-fourth of the year. I just know that local shops would not do such a thing; they know their customers would not appreciate it.
It might be that this is revealing of something driving conflict, confrontation, and degradation in the world.
I am given to understand that the dominant number of people in hedge funds are educated in elite business schools teaching that money is the prime objective, that countries are nothing more than companies supplying, producing or consuming goods, and that they can be staffed with anybody from anywhere to maintain or increase monetary performance for those working in hedge funds. They just help themselves to everyone else’s histories, pasts, and hard work expended in building their national families.
It seems as though to them earth is nothing more than a factory planet. That they see nations not as national families, but as nothing more than places of economic production, just like business entities. That nations are worker-pools which can be increased, decreased, a shunted here and there based on the prime directive of profit. A nice self-serving point of view.
I’m a strong capitalist. I believe that what is mine is mine, and yours is yours, based on merit and production. When assistance moves to others it should move through charities not socialist governments. And I believe you've got to respect the other guy and his life and not belittle him and place yourself above him by assuming that he exists for your benefit and production. He's living his life as best he is able, as are you. Manners, consideration, belief in God, mutual respect, arms-length bargaining, voluntary participation in economics, balance out different competing desires between those who want to build a huge pile of money with the most toys, and those who want to spend more of their one pass through life on other things available.
Within the last month one European country’s leader stated he or she wanted to start importing new citizens to grow the economy because the country’s people were not producing enough, as though a nation’s economy takes priority over the mood and will of the people. As if the country’s People exist for their economy, and not that the economy is a function of the existence and activities of the People. For instance now and then people just want to sit down and take a rest. You can’t run full speed all the time. There’s more to life. After all, God put people here, not money and business. We just invented them to deal with each other. If before then they've been busting their butts to produce, build and grow it doesn't mean that when things reach a certain level and people quite naturally want to rest or coast for awhile, the leaders say “well then we're going to swap you out or impose upon you an influx of strangers in order to keep the production at a high level.” The national production exists only to serve the people of a nation, or at least it used to.
Imagine your household, and your dad or mom have been working extra hours or a second job to earn extra money to get a few extra nice things for the house. When they accomplish the goal, they want to take a break and enjoy the fruits of their labor to get more out of life, and think about and better learn its meaning and purpose. But then the local authorities show up and say no, your house has been producing at a certain level and must keep doing so and even do more, so they are going to stuff some strangers in to live with you in order to keep the output at that level. That threatens to destroy the integrity of the family unit in the name of money and convert the family’s function to continual labor based on someone else’s view of what it is important to do in life.
These are bad-judgment habits that somehow need to change.
At any rate, in my little opinion, it would be better for our culture if Lowe's, Costco, and Universal Studios would just elect to move all the ghouls into the back room until October 1st.
Martin C. Boire
August 8, 2023
Overly educated, overly experienced. Often right, often wrong.
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