Happy Halloween all. It's that day when kids in some neighborhoods go trick or treating, when gay men hold incredibly lavish costume parties, and when people in some neighborhoods get high as kites and a little crazy and go out with guns and shoot up shit. It's a night when people in some neighborhoods go nuts and burn things down and loot at will. Of course it's also the night that the movie industry celebrates by making movies about teenage girls in various stages of undress getting slashed to pieces by maniacs. Now that's entertainment.
Personally, I have many warm fuzzy memories of Halloweens past. As a child you'd go tromping door to door with a group of other kids and carrying bags to put all the loot in (spelled c-a-n-d-y). Then all the adults would have to put up with the ensuing sugar rush for several days afterwards until all the loot was eaten. Then there were the Halloween Carnivals that were held at your school, with costume contests, and Halls of Horror, and various games to raise money. For kids Halloween was just cool.
Of course there was the time in 6th grade when I got to go trick or treating with a group of kids that included Cindy Simon, who I had a huge crush on. We walked through the graveyard at the end of the street I lived on, and dared each other to walk on graves and kept a wary eye out for ghosts and goblins. Then on the way home that night, as I walked down the street alone the last block or two, a carload of teenagers drove by and hit me with a water balloon. Didn't really hurt anything but my pride, but it was kind of a drag of a way to end a night that had been a lot of innocent fun. Still, I was not maimed or seriously hurt.
Somewhere out there kids still go trick or treating and feel safe in America, but a lot of parents are very cautious about letting their kids go out alone these days. When I was a child, we always went out after dark. In the City of Chicago today, people walk house to house with their kids and start at about 4 in the afternoon. By 7 o'clock it's mostly done. People take their kids down streets with businesses and trick or treat in stores, who have candy on the counter to give to the kids. Still, in middle class neighborhoods the streets are awash in kids dressed as princesses and pirates and ghosts and goblins and dinosaurs and doggies, for hours on the last day of October.
Then there are the neighborhoods such as the one where I work, The Back of the Yards. On the last day of school before Halloween, or on Halloween proper, if it comes on a school day, large numbers of kids don't come to school. They are afraid to leave the house. The thugs have a heyday on Halloween. They throw eggs at everything that moves or doesn't. They get drunk and high and beat people up for sport. After dark the older sorts get drunk and high and the looting, burning, and shooting starts. The police have a very busy night.
One thing I have learned over the years is that there are varying degrees of safety in American society. If you live in a middle class or upper class neighborhood, life is generally safe. People can walk down the streets unmolested, day or night. Children can go outside and play. In places like Back of the Yards, 99% of the population lives below the poverty line. Gangs and illegal activity abound. Very few people have much education and life, at times, is anarchical, or as Thomas Hobbes said about life in a state of nature, "It's nasty, brutish, and short." Police have a difficult time protecting the citizens there. There are far too many opportunities for something to go amiss and another citizen to be gunned down, or in some cases beaten to death.
I work in a high school in this neighborhood and for the most part I work with really likable nice kids, doing their level best to grow up and have a normal life in the midst of all this mayhem. Friday afternoon at about 3 PM, one of my students came to me and asked if I would help him to get his lock open. He couldn't get his hoodie and notebook out of his locker. He's a nice kid, but for some reason he hasn't figured out combination locks yet. He knew the numbers, but couldn't get it right to open it up with the combination we all learned somewhere back there, 1 right, 2 left, and 1 right again.
I helped M. open his locker and his girlfriend was there with him. Neither of them are going to be a doctor or lawyer or engineer, but they're basically good kids and I do everything I can to help them on their way to gaining the skills and knowledge necessary to getting some kind of sustainable income and being a functioning citizen. I got the lock open for them and before they left I asked M. where they were going. "What are you guys doing now?"
M. looked back at me at that point and in all seriousness he told me, "Mr. Ray, I'm going home. It's Halloween. I ain't gonna get shot." I gathered all the warm memories I have in my mind of Halloween, and I thought about all of those kids in the good neighborhoods and their parties and costume contests and trick or treating, and I nearly wept on the spot for this young man and his girlfriend. All too many Americans grow up in these circumstances, and strangely a great many of them turn out okay. We don't hear about them. We hear about the ones who went out on Halloween, the ones who got shot, the ones who shot someone, the ones who were arrested for assault, robbery, rape, and various other ways to screw up your life and the lives of others. I begin to pine for the innocence of my own Halloweens, and wish like hell that these kids could just for once experience that, instead of what they do experience.
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