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Carpal Tunnel
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I really liked this take on this year's Halloween "dilemma," so I thought I'd post it here for sharing:
Cancel
Halloween? Just
say boo
by Kathleen O'Brien
10/25/01
We grown-ups get our little
islands of celebration -- our Yankees game, our Columbus
Day parade, our Monday Night Football -- to distract and
uplift us, terrorists be damned.
But when the kids are scheduled to have their fun, we
suddenly get the heebie-jeebies, leading to talk of
canceling Halloween this year.
That would be a mistake.
Sure, if you're the type of parent who will mistake every
Jolly Rancher for a chunk of plastic explosives, by all
means keep your kids home that night. Authorities are
right to fear a flood of frantic Halloween eve calls from
people panicked over SweeTarts.
If you can manage to avoid being that type of parent, have
at it.
This time around, the holiday does come at a scary time.
Every day, if not every hour, the news introduces us to
bizarre topics of worry. All the more reason to send the
kiddies trick-or-treating. They need this holiday, and they
need it now.
True, canceling Halloween will help parents feel less
scared. However, a cancellation may make children feel
more scared.
And whose mood deserves to be bolstered more -- theirs or
ours?
After all, kids take their cues from their parents. I recall
that during the Cuban missile crisis, I was too young to
understand what was going on. But I could grasp that for
one long day, my mother was very afraid. That was good
enough for me: If she was afraid, I was afraid.
Here we are, trying to reassure kids that they are safe.
Then we go and cancel their favorite day of the year? Kids
aren't idiots; they'll decode the mixed message. Our deeds
will surely speak louder than our words.
Halloween has always been the one day of the year when
children get to scare adults. The tables are turned, and
they're in charge. They get to be the ones wearing fangs
and ghost costumes. Mom and Dad, who are normally so
reassuring, are forced into the role of petrified onlookers.
And everybody laughs.
It carries with it just a little bit of danger, a night when the
rules (against too much candy, pranks, shouting, getting
dirty) are tossed aside for a few hours. In the garden of
holidays, Halloween remains the weed, wild and untamed.
It helps to take the long view: Presumably Halloween came
into being -- and has survived for 2,000 years -- because it
serves some psychological need. Throughout the
centuries, it has been celebrated at times when the world
truly was a scary and mysterious place, full of famine,
drought, pestilence and germs for which there was no
medicine. Death came quickly and often.
Yet in the midst of that chronic terror, people invented a
holiday to mock their fear. Presumably they did that
because in the magical alchemy of the evening, Halloween
made them less afraid.
If they could pull off Halloween, so can we.
Time to draw a line in the sand. Get that ghost costume
and get ready.
(c) 2001 The Star-Ledger
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 11,613 |
People have brought up the idea of cancelling Halloween?? Danged buncha idiots. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Posts: 4,189 |
Yes, evidently there's fear of anthrax incidents in trick-or-treat candy, and also the worry that emergency crews may be overtaxed in responding to bogus reports of such. But I think it's pretty foolish. Firstly, why would you take your children trick-or-treating in unfamiliar neighborhoods (especially at a time like this), and who would have the ridiculous notion of perpetrating such an act without getting caught outright?
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Carpal Tunnel
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WoN
Unfortunately, in the US we have 285 million people or some number thereabouts. There are kooks everywhere. Not a lot of them, they are statistically insignificant, but there nonetheless. And if a kook is intent on poisoning some kids all he or she has to do is use a hypodermic needle to inject something into a candy bar right through the wrapper. Then the candy goes into the sack with a bunch of other candy. The parents have no idea whence it came, but it kills a couple of kids.
Statistically insignificant quickly becomes very significant when it's your kid or the kid of someone you know.
Theo and Sasha, who are almost 6 and almost 4 respectively, will go well-chaperoned only to houses of people we know and trust. Luckily we are pretty outgoing about our neighbors and know quite a few people.
I once wrote an article about the Oklahoma City bombing which had in it how people could be better citizens. In our neighborhood of single family dwellings, most people can see about ten to twelve houses from their own front door. Most of the people do not know more than one or two of that dozen. I urged people to make their neighborhoods better by making an effort to meet their neighbors. It is from these beginnings that a sense of community arises.
It's a sad thing when you don't know the name of the person who lives across the street from you.
Ted
TEd
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TEd
Yes, we have, indeed, been dealing with the dangers of the "kook" factor for some twenty nigh years now (and in a less high-profile fashion for years before that)...but we've learned to be careful and vigilant with the children's trick-or-treat itinerary and the contents of their collected candy. And we still haven't cancelled trick-or-treating over it, or, to my knowledge, lost any children. But, now, suddenly, to think some terrorist or cell would waste their time dropping a few anthrax-treated pieces of candy in trick-or-treat bags at a set location, and to cancel Halloween over it, seems a bit far-fetched.
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