¡Feliz Dias de los Muertos To You! Here we are caught between Halloween and Election day, an interesting place to be. Bush, Kerry and Bin Laden - all masks of one face? consider Bin Laden's latest enigmatic message:

"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry, Bush or Al-Qaeda, it is in within your own state."

Does this mean the individual states of America, such as California, I asked myself? Or what if... What would it imply if it meant our own state of mind, and where within that mind we choose to draw the line?

On this day when the threshold between the living and the dead is said to be most porous, I would like to rest in the knowledge that we are here for eternity and hence there is nothing to fear, least of all some scary Halloween masks - be they of nuclear terrorists threatening Doomsday or mad presidents waging Texas chainsaw massacres on our environment. Maybe it's all just our unsettled and as yet misperceived self-identity being reflected back on us. God playing hide and seek and trick or treat with himself? Worth thinking twice about anyway on Election day.

I leave you with an obscure line from an obscure poem by a forgotten Russian poet:

"Faces don't hate each other, Masks hate each other. But our faces are wearing masks."

World peace begins with peace inside.

CHAD