Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke

When a local poet and family therapist whom I recently met suggested we watch the Procession of the Holy Ghost from St. Dominic’s to the Portuguese Hall on West J, my wife and I were there. Curbside talk before the parade focused on the significance of the tradition and the worrisome decline in its observance among the young. Like immigrant languages that fade from one generation to the next, some of those standing in the shade along the parade route feared the extinction of a tradition that is hundreds of years old.

I watched the procession move slowly, vibrant colors fluttering like long ribbons stretching down the hill and up, as the participants walked along East I from the church. They stopped at First Street to raise the US and Portuguese flags as the band played each country’s national anthem. The parade of young and old then proceeded up First Street, and near the end, four men wearing crimson vests passed carrying a statue of Queen Isabel who, in the thirteenth century, after construction had begun on a church dedicated to the glorification of the Holy Ghost, began a tradition called "Coronation of the Emperor" during which she treated the poor as royalty for a day and gave them food.

A Festival Queen and her entourage were last in the procession. The Queen needed both hands to balance the large silver crown on her head. When the Queen reached the Hall, she blessed us with her crown and released a white dove that hesitatingly flew to several perches on the front of the building before finding freedom. As I watched it fly away, I was thankful that the Portuguese-American community had shared their tradition and bread with spectators like myself, but I was also sad that America, in its break-neck modernization, had devalued its traditions to extra time off, barbecues and sports on TV.

Though my father’s generation saved democracy and millions of people from extermination, we, their children, did not live through the threat of world domination by a tyrant. The nuclear threat hanging over our heads seemed more coolly technological and distant than the concentration-camp genocide and unfathomable death of WWII. When presented with the War in Vietnam as our chance to serve like our fathers to stem the Communist menace, many of us protested that it was an overreaction to an isolated problem. When Khrushchev’s threat to bury us was given as evidence of the threat abroad, we raised the specters of racism, sexism, intolerance, discrimination and poverty at home as proof that our own house was not in order. And while there was logic and foolishness on all sides, domestic injustices were clearly in need of redress and became ready totems in support of our wholesale abandonment of traditions that, we reasoned, perpetuated the status quo.

We who liberated sex and the sexes, we who defined and refined the generation gap, we who condemned but were full participants in the me-generation, had a grand time vanquishing traditions. But what, as a result, have we done to our children? How will they honor service to others when the 4^th of July means a parade and fireworks, Memorial Day means the pool is open, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day is just another day to work? If we can only hope to be what we celebrate, who will our children be? What will their traditions become?

Prayer in school and a proper respect for our flag will be solutions offered by some. But we are a religiously diverse nation, so we’ll either pray in isolation or infringe on the religious practices of others. And those who wear flags on their pants and shirts should certainly not go to jail for desecration. Such solutions, however well intentioned they may be, become loyalty litmus tests that divide us as a nation while further alienating our children.

Instead I would suggest we are in need of secular traditions that we wholeheartedly teach our children year after year and generation after generation, traditions that embody what it means to be a person in service to others. You may protest that we already have such traditions, and I agree with you. The secular holidays I’ve already mentioned and others besides could bring us together as a nation if we took the time and effort to celebrate them properly.

As parents of our children, we should praise the best in our past and avoid the temptation to use the "time off" to get away for a long weekend. Perhaps our secular holidays should fall on a Saturday so we could focus as a nation on their meaning through teach-ins and storytelling as well as parades and fireworks. And perhaps all businesses should voluntarily close so we wouldn’t be tempted to shop. We could then reward ourselves for having properly celebrated who we are and the values we want our children to emulate by taking Monday off. Hell, we could take Tuesday off as well. Our children would be better off for it.

- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.

Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com  

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