Halloween

We did not have many trick or treaters this Halloween, a total of only seven in three groups. Some years we do a little better, but we rarely have a bunch. Over the last few decades Halloween has become more fun for adults and less fun for kids. It is good that more adults  join in the fun – decorating  their houses, dressing in costumes, or having parties.  But I wish the kids better  than the way things have turned out for many of them.

The trouble began in the 1960s with stories in the media about criminals and psychopaths putting razor blades (and later needles) in apples or candy given to trick or treaters.  It  turned out that most of the cases were hoaxes, and most of the rest may have been  pranks by kids, but the damage was done. As late as a few years ago one of the medical outfits in our town was getting publicity by offering to X-ray the contents of kids’ trick or treat bags.  Then there were the urban legends about poisoned or dope-laced Halloween candy  that probably peaked in the 1980s but still circulate.

Such scare stories hyped by the media with no regard to either accuracy or statistical context have frightened parents. Some parents  have forbidden trick or treating altogether – perhaps turning to such gosh awful alternatives as trunk or treat gatherings in church or store parking lots. Others have fired up the helicopter  and followed kids old enough to trick or treat on their own on their rounds. It is too bad. Old people often think things in their childhood were better than what kids have now. In this case  they are right. Going out in the dark with one’s buddies looking for candy and adventure was pretty good fun.

Giving Back

Every so often people write articles about  trite, over used, syrupy, or simply annoying words or phrases they would like to see fall into disuse. I would like to nominate “giving back” as in “giving back to the community” or “giving back to his fans” or “giving back to the people of _________”   for dishonorable retirement, not only because it has become such a hackneyed phase and one so often uttered with such mush mouthed piety,  but also because of the assumptions behind its use.  

When one hears talk about giving back or the need to give back to the community, there is usually an at least implied sense of some sort of obligation or even of some level of guilt to be assuaged. Yet a person who came by his success honestly and fairly  has no such obligation and should feel no such guilt. He  would be quite right to reply to a claim that he is obligated to give something back by simply stating that no he isn’t, because he never took anything  that did not belong to him. In fact a person who acquires wealth honestly by selling his goods and/or services has already given back every time he did so by giving the people he sold to something they valued enough to pay him for it. There is no obligation beyond that. Giving charitably to people or organizations that he wants to help or support is a fine thing for a successful person to do - “giving”,  without the “back” and its implications of guilt and obligation. That is the clean way to do it.

Of course there are people who are obligated to give something back. They are the  thieves and con artists of the world, and their form of giving back has a precise name. It is called restitution. The rest of us should do our giving freely, because we want to, not because of any obligation or a need to appease someone.  

The Sad case of the Non-barking Dog

There are times when we can learn as much from noticing what did not happen as we learn from observing what did. People who lived under the Soviets talk about piecing together ideas of actual events from the omissions in Pravda. In a famous Sherlock Holmes story, a mystery was solved by noticing that a dog had not barked under circumstances where, if certain assumptions had been true, it would have. We are seeing something similar in the case of Anthony Weiner.

Reporters, politicians of both parties, and assorted public moralists are expressing outrage all over the various media about his actions. Leaders of his own party have pleaded for his resignation. It has been a national scandal. Yet what he really did, while puerile, creepy, and a bit revolting, was not really a big deal. He exchanged vulgar photos of himself and messages about himself with various women who participated voluntarily. (At least one of his correspondents was a teenage girl, but there has been no report that he solicited her or did anything else illegal in his contacts with her.)

What I find interesting is that these are the things people are focusing on and outraged about. Almost no one is calling him to task for his systematic, ongoing, serial, vilely unscrupulous lying about the matter. He lied to people in the media. He lied to the public. He lied to his colleagues. He lied to his friends and associates, many of whom were made to look foolish in public by defending him. He lied even as he confessed to his earlier rounds of lying. Yet, almost no one is citing that as a reason for him to resign in disgrace. Someone once wrote that one of the things Americans are least honest about is their expectation of honesty. They say they value honesty and expect it of others, but routinely accept that touts and politicians are lying to them without holding them the least bit accountable for it. This case illustrates that very well. People should be demanding that Weiner leave office, not only or mainly because his a pervert, but because he has shown himself to be an utter scoundrel. That this is not happening very much suggests in a sad way just how much the American people have become accustomed and resigned to mendacity from those in power. Outrage over the lying is the worrisome dog that should be barking like mad and is not.

The Return of the 1970’s

I lived through the 1970’s and their inflationary depression. It was a dismal, lousy decade. The economy was in shambles with shortages, intermittent energy “crises”, cripplingly high interest rates, and a continuing, unrelenting inflation that sapped the economy and decimated people’s savings. The government under both parties grew more powerful, intrusive, costly, aggressive, and vigorously annoying. Abroad the Cold War was raging on, and we were losing. The decade saw a failed war in Vietnam, disaster and humiliation in Iran, the rise of OPEC with unfriendly governments demanding exorbitant prices for oil they had stolen from American and British companies, the expansion of the Soviet empire into Africa and Latin America, and the relative and in some cases absolute decline of American military power versus the Soviets. For so-called leaders the nation had Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, two men who belong on any sensibly thought out list of the nation’s five or six worst presidents.

The national mood in response to all this was a sense of fear, gloom, and foreboding so deep and pervasive as probably to seem incomprehensible to someone coming of age in the 1980’s or thereafter. Shops and mail order outfits sprang up all over the country selling wheat grinders, freeze dried food, insect proof bulk storage bins, and other “survivalist” supplies. There was a brisk market for books on how to profit from an impending economic collapse and how to survive a coming worse than just economic collapse. Gun stores did very a good business in weapons and ammo. There was a huge demand for gold, silver, and various collectibles. The press was full of articles proclaiming that the American era was over and that the rising generation of boomers would have to accept a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. George Will wrote a column claiming that no nation had fallen as far and as fast as the United States was doing since the collapse of imperial Spain (not a completely unreasonable opinion given what was going on and that high government officials were speaking of the need to negotiate a tolerable second position for America in a Soviet-dominated world). There was talk of malaise in the nation, but that was too mild a term for what was really going on in people’s minds.

Yet we know how it all ended. We turned ourselves around. The United States won the Cold War. The early 1980’s began a quarter century of prosperity and economic progress. People were able to look back on the worries and apocalyptic talk of the 1970’s as overdone, as a strange and almost silly or quaint aberration and certainly as something that belonged in the dead past – until lately.

Now we are seeing it again - the fear,the aggressive government, the serious economic troubles, the failure and drift abroad (though nothing nearly as serious as the Cold War), the doubts about the country’s future, and even two presidents who would make fairly good stand-ins for Nixon and Carter. Once again people are stocking up on gold, silver, guns, and ammo. Once again there is money to be made selling bulk food supplies and writing books on how to survive the coming something or other. Once again, large numbers of the citizens are worried that the government is moving from mere drag and annoyance to positive threat.

It seems to be the 1970’s all over again. We woke up and worked out way out of that mess. We can only hope that we will be as good and as lucky again.