Because May 1 is such a great holiday, I'll say Happy Beltane again this week! But that's only one small part of it. This week I was also witness to the birth of Caer Cormorant; a Gorsedd, or gathering of Bards (doing it Druid style) in Olympia. May day is also often recognized as a holiday intended to rally for worker's rights, in America, and across the world. So I'm going to take a moment here to address the worker's tragedy that just recently occurred in Bangladesh. During the last week of April a large crack appeared in one of the buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This crack was several stories long and the building it was found on was used as a garment factory (ever noticed how many of your clothing items say "made in Bangladesh?"), it employed several hundred (if not thousand) very low wage workers, mostly young women between the ages of 15 and 20. Dhaka authorities ordered the building evacuated as it was deemed unsafe. One factory owner sent his employees to work in the building anyway, threatening them with loss of one months wages if they didn't work in this building which he and the engineers he paid said was not going to collapse on anyone. Within two hours of these workers starting their shifts the building did collapse.
The death toll now stands at 580 workers! Rescuers have given up on finding any survivors any more as they continue to dig through the rubble. Until recently, hardly any news outlet at all even mentioned this tragedy. Amy Goodman reported it on
Democracy Now! a news show broadcast on KAOS and some other Pacifica stations. Aside from Amy Goodman listeners almost no one had heard of this tragedy. To raise awareness of this tragedy myself and a few others, working with are local food co-op, tied tatters of cloth on the branches of a tree in their parking lot, when last I checked, only about 220 tatters had made it onto the branches of that tree, but it did make people stop and ask"what are these tatters about?" When they heard they were understandably appalled by the conditions these Bangladeshi people are forced to work in and they became aware of these injustices that still occur in the world time after tragic time. Those tatters waving silently on the tree? Each one represents another life lost for the comforts of western consumerism. Hopefully, we will reach 580 tatters before the co-op members, or their representatives, ask for them to be removed.
Music wise, this week on Wheel of Wonder, we'll have a few new Beltane songs and in the 9 o' clock hour we'll have a special Interview with Peter Mayer, an inspired and universally spiritual singer songwriter from Minnesota. To hear some of Pete's great songs, go to his
website, or listen on
YouTube. I look forward to bringing you this week's Wheel of Wonder!
Picture Credits: Picture one is a double-crested Cormorant from Wikimedia Commons, the second picture is the tatters on the tree, by me.
