Hungry Ghosts Among Us.

Hungry Ghosts Amongst Us.
“We are the Martians.” Nigel Kneale Quatermass & the Pit.
News Flash: there is a global conspiracy after all. It consists of around two thousand billionaires whose objective is simply to make more money at whatever cost. At whatever cost that is, to the Earth or to you and me. Obviously enough they have not coordinated to smash the status quo that enriches them or unleashed microbes to which they are of course as vulnerable as the rest of us. They simply exploit whatever crisis brings further wealth. They know when melt comes to flood, that there is enough high ground for them. But even that is probably not enough. And if any seventy or so changed their activity tomorrow, the threat of climate change would be all but over.

The 7^th Lunar Month which opened on the 8^th August is traditionally the Time of the Hungry Ghosts: souls who have passed on but not passed away. They hover about us, frustrated and mean, in death as in life, they are voracious – for food, sex, money and possessions. They are said to inhabit a half-world where nothing is physical and no appetite can be met.

The usual proscriptions against the Hungry Ghosts are to stay away from hospitals, cemeteries, funerals, votive offerings and candles. And indeed open spaces such as beaches and parks. Which is a tall order anywhere, but quite a condition when you consider that much of Europe decamps to just such open spaces for most of August.

A cockroach is said to be able to survive for a fortnight on a fingerprint but billions are not enough for billionaires. They always need more. Their needs are as prodigious as their wealth: affable scrounger Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos the world’s worst employer, armchair fascist Elon Musk; not content with fortunes aggregating massively at our expense during the recent unpleasantness, ride their phallic symbols into the stratosphere while Covid rages beneath them. In vaccine-starved India and sub-Saharan Africa a fraction of their wealth would save legions. These amateur astronauts are hungry ghosts.

Like you I consume: food, drink, fmcgs, cars, laptops, paper, firmware. And like you I do my bit: re-cycling, reusing, buying from the right producers, shunning the wrong ones, avoiding meat and dairy and so on. And I’ve spent most of my life trying to do good. But I wield little power.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to literal ghosts, hungry or full, other than as obstacles in mental, emotional or physical space. Nor indeed am I convinced by karma as a cosmic balancing system. But what I do see in Mustique, in Acapulco, in Davos and Palm Beach is the near end of a long queue. Every August tread extra carefully; best not to join it.
Richard Ashworth 26^th July 2021.