Black Friday as a national holiday?

ACODECO, the nation’s consumer protection and business ethics people, takes it seriously enough. They’re out there looking for specious “discounts” and other deceptive practices the “Black Friday” sales, as they were earlier this year for the derivative “Black Week” promotions. Never mind all the ads in which black people are conspicuously absent.

Black Friday derives from a US holiday not officially observed in Panama, which this year happened to fall on a patriotic day off – Independence from Spain here, Thanksgiving up there.
In the USA it’s this step into Christmas season, with customs with respect to a Western Christian holiday we have in common with Panamanians. Yes, people give Christmas presents in many places and the main martyred prophet of Christianity – some say the son of God, who lives today and eternally – DID multiply some grocery items of his time, bread and wine.

That, however, was not to flaunt his wealth but to share among a crowd that had gathered to hear him speak.

Leave it to a US consumer culture that considers a man’s worth to be the net value of his assets to turn the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birthday into a spending binge and time to display conspicuous wealth, and the day after Thanksgiving when a lot of Christmas shopping is done into a celebration of material consumption with a name of its own.

Panama should be more careful about what we import. We MIGHT, for example, import an old and now discredited Chinese custom and celebrate May 7 as a day to send people with deviant ideas off to labor camps for re-indoctrination.

Can’t we just get back to celebrating what Jesus Christ said, did and stood for?

November is a month of patriotic parades, mostly celebrating our independence first from Spain, then from Colombia. November 28 in addition to independence from Spain is also the anniversary of a day in 1885 when the citizens of Panama City, occasionally devastated by fires that swept through neighborhood, organized the Cuerpo de Bomberos, our fire department that survives today.

Let’s recognize the other patriotic holiday to come in January, The Day of the Martyrs, and add a note about November 28 of last year, when a court decision to the effect of what January 9, 1964 was all about. Panama is a sovereign republic whose people will not accept the country being colonized, either by another country or by some foreign company carving out dibs on part of our territory.

One of the November holidays, the first call for independence from Spain or the Grito de La Villa de Los Santos, involved a legendary, perhaps mythical, young woman who was said to be a revolutionary instigator, Rufina Alfaro. The leading lady on November 28 of last year, attorney Martita Cornejo, is anything but a myth. She went to the Supreme Court and won a decision that stopped a foreign company’s mining colony project dead in its tracks. The company is still maneuvering to reverse that verdict. We will avoid being recolonized if the Panamanian people stand together and insist. People died for this.

 

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