Editor:
Halloween is a celebration of death. Grotesque images occupy public places: rotting faces, hatchet-split heads, dripping brains, severed limbs offer their newest definitions of “hilarity’’ to our never-ending fun.
I see the world through the eyes of my five-year-old grandson. A skeleton (with fire eyes, Grampa!) in a local library has upset him for a week. A library? Why do we do this to innocents and our original innocence?
If we want to scare ourselves with broken bodies, we can perhaps imagine what a strike does to a target in the Middle East, what a Hellfire missile does to a family it lands near. Or, in the spirit of the season, perhaps an entrepreneur can organize the curious in drowned refugee spotting tours – maybe charge extra if they want to take selfies with the corpses.
The free market, which is very expensive on every level, has made us absurd. Psychosexual nightmares replace ordinary living so that we stay scared enough into imagining we might actually, briefly, feel something and have meaning.
Please take images that degrade humanity out of public view. We have enough to be scared of if we only open our hearts.
Joe Dougherty, Roberts Creek
