Desecration Of The Dead

El Paso, Texas has 700,000 people, and if our sister city of Juarez is included we have well over two million inhabitants. In a metropolitan area this large there are many cemeteries including a national military cemetery. Almost without exception the dead buried in these cemeteries are provided with all appropriate respect and decorum.

There is one notable exception: Concordia Cemetery. By American standards it is fairly old. Many graves there date to the mid-1800s. On their web site the group which is trying to preserve the cemetery says:

“Buried here are over 60,000 people including gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buffalo Soldiers, Texas Rangers, Civil War Veterans, early Mormon pioneers, Florida (Lady Flo) Wolf, Lawman John Selman and was formerly the first burial site for Mexican Revolution President Victoriano Huerta and numerous other civic leaders, pioneers, and war veterans.”

The Concordia Heritage Association has recently been fostering a carnival atmosphere at the cemetery. Dressing up as 1800’s prostitutes and murderers (gun fighters) they stage simulated gun fights. As a fund raising project they have formed a close alliance with a rather peculiar group of paranormal ghost hunters. Together they have been exploiting the dead by encouraging late night tours, where people are encouraged to believe that they see ghosts, and where paranormal phenomena are treated as reasonable and normal.

These activities taking place at Concordia Cemetery are disrespectful of the dead. This is a genuine sacrilege. Their irreverence by dressing up for the TV camera as whores and murderers demonstrates clear-cut disrespect for the dead. Allowing the paranormal phreaks to use this sacred burial site in order to promote their strange and offensive ideas is a mockery of the civilized way that western civilization has treated its dead for thousands of years.

My grandmother is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery which lies about 400 yards south of Concordia. If some group of people were trying to defile the cemetery she is buried in with the same carnival atmosphere that is happening at Concordia I would be at the front of the angry crowd demonstrating against this sacrilegious despoliation.

The Concordia Heritage group means well. But they have lost their way. Fund raising and continued growth of the group has overcome all sense of respect for the dead.

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