halloween

There is no single holiday that better exemplifies our self-isolation than Halloween. I personally walk past a hundred some houses on the way to work and I know nothing of their residents. The neighbors have done nothing to introduce themselves. Their children run erratically around our house, but I have never received more than a passing nod or “hello” from any of them. There are thousands of people wandering throughout the downtown, but no cordial greetings.

Instead, conversations are held through messenger programs, telephone conversations, or emails, if at all. Distrust and paranoia run rampant with local news and media sensationalizing and embellishing anything that may land them better ratings. People avoid the bus, certain shopping centers, certain neighborhoods, and any number of other places. The fear is palpable. I’m not immune. I feel unease passing the homeless or any large group of anyone that appears out of place.

It’s a detriment to everyone. More drugs needed, more security desired, and more freedoms forfeited in favor of over-arching protection. We used to leave doors unlocked fearlessly, but that, apparently, was before thieves began infiltrating homes. Anyone misunderstood or outside of our desired norms is segregated, stigmatized, demonized, and looked on with condescension. We protect our kids from millions of possible threats based on elaborate reports that are exaggerated close to the point of being outright lies.

A search on Google for “poisonous candy halloween children” renders over seven hundred thousand items. There was never any instance of a child receiving tainted or poisoned candy by a madman doling death randomly. The only reported case was a father murdering his own child. But, this story emerges every year as a “scoop” or “breaking news” on any news station desperate for ideas. Abductions by masked assailants are just as unlikely, but just as news-worthy. Is it possible? Could it happen? How do you protect your child? Can your neighbors be trusted?

With the sense of community eroded or completely demolished, we’re left with untrustworthy neighbors and surrounded by insanity. Children walk, chaperoned, a few blocks in either direction, to fill their plastic bags/containers/pillow cases with as many high-calorie, nutrition-free consumables possible. That candy is checked, distributed, and eaten too quickly all over the fattest nation on the globe. The times vary by community, but are all typically before dark because it’s understood that darkness brings the crazy people out of their dens of horror.

October thirty-first was, at it’s core, a time for community. A time where entire towns celebrated a long-standing, though misplaced, tradition of harvest, ancestry, and renewal. We’ve lost that. Not only have we lost the original ties to the earth through candy manufacturers’ blunt-force campaigns and card printers over-saturation, but we’ve lost the togetherness. The trick-or-treating has been reduced to a practice of untrusting parents to appease their greedy fat kids, understood and facilitated by other untrusting parents and friendly neighbors too tied to the past to notice a difference.

Only after all sense of camaraderie has dissolved, can someone stand at the refrigerator at the office and make a statement like, “it’s such a ridiculous holiday anyway. I mean, walking in the freezing cold to strangers houses for candy?” Yes, office drone, you are walking to strangers houses for candy. That is what it’s been reduced to.

It is a shell of the Pagan holiday it once was, celebrated throughout societies as a night when the place of their ancestors was closest the living world. A night when they could dress as demons and ghosts to calm those restless dead. A night celebrating the harvest and the sustenance that it brought. A night of bonfires, costumes, and community. It was a night of relaxation and bonfires and ghost stories and entertainment.

Now it’s a four-hour block of daylight determined by committee to be the safest, where your child gleefully dresses as a comic book hero, children’s show character, or G-rated demon. He or she strolls three feet in front of you around the block, filling his or her receptacle with as many branded items of unhealthy as he or she can from strangers you’ve never spoken to or visited. It falls near a weekend where your female friends and daughters can dress in her sluttiest and drink themselves to retardation. It’s surrounded by a hundred different movie marathons and holiday-oriented episodes of sitcoms or dramas, filled with trite themes and ridiculous costumes.

That’s what it’s become. It is empty and shallow. Much like ourselves, but without the pills or things to buy to fill its void.