2020: Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone.

Night has fallen, the moon is full, and candy is plentiful. Halloween is a beautiful holiday, and I wish to note one particular aspect of it: Breaking rules. That oft repeated line, “Trick or treat,” is a threat. Give us a treat or else. If the threat is ever carried out, the trick is usually something small like toilet paper thrown about a yard, a harmless prank. However, that part of the celebration is mostly vestigial, mostly contained in the phrase, “Trick or treat.”

Still, it is a night of rule breaking, of obscuring one’s face, of sneaking around in the dark. It is a night to be a little scared, or to be a little scary. It is a night to be what you’re not, to make believe, to let the imagination run down all the forbidden corridors.

Tonight is Halloween. I hope you all have a pleasant romp through the darkness, and that you bring many treasures home into the light. I hope our culture’s knowledge of when to break the rules will not be relegated to idioms of forgotten meaning. Soon, something of far more import than Halloween will be upon us, and those who make and enforce the rules will be elected.

This year has felt a little like a very stretched out Halloween, not a single passing night, but a season of topsy-turvy, and I don’t like the “tricks” being played. I don’t like to see the cities burning, see rioters and looters pretending to be protestors. I don’t like realizing that those in the costumes of peace-keepers are in effect only dressed up for this long Halloween.

And I don’t like that the rules seemingly only perpetuate the insanity. Halloween is fun and beautiful as it breaks the norm, not as it becomes it. It is fun to wander in the night when you know that the day is coming. The election is coming, but I fear that whatever happens will not fix the madness. In the end, it is not a problem of which president is in office, or which senator or governor. The problem is us, and that is the scariest thing I can think of this Halloween night.

I think it’s time we take off the masks. Let’s break the rules of this long night.