Here in the Catskills, Halloween is sort of classic. Eldred, New York is too small and spread out
for children to go house-to-house, but our “Trunk or Treat,” with people like
me giving out candy in the Peck’s supermarket parking lot, is well attended. The weather is usually appropriate, cool but
not too cold, and it’s dark early.
There’s enough wind to imagine you’re hearing things, but children here,
playing outdoors, develop good judgment about what to fear and not fear. That’s better than many older people.
What do I mean?
Here are some things none of us should be afraid of.
One is widespread gun confiscation. It will never happen in the United
States. There will long be debates on
what can be sold to whom, and even on what the Founding Fathers intended as the
spirit of the Second Amendment, but I’ve never heard of anyone in any kind of
responsible position making a case for taking them away from law-abiding
people. For that matter, I haven’t heard
that from insane or irresponsible ones either.
Two is the effect of climate change during our
lifetimes. Even if you accept the
five-horse parlay that a) Earth’s long-term weather is getting warmer, b) a
large portion of that is caused by 200-pound creatures on a 6.6 sextillion ton
planet, c) such change is consistently harmful, d) our actions are capable of
halting it, and e), no technology will emerge that will reverse or largely
mitigate the problem, it is a slow process, and about as likely to stop us, in
this half of the century, as a glacier.
Three, Ebola. There
will be no epidemic here. It is barely
more contagious than AIDS, meaning casual contact, unless somehow involving
eyes, lips, or open cuts, cannot spread it.
Containing Ebola is a good idea, since we don’t want to trifle with
diseases so deadly, but few of us need to be concerned.
Four, statistics-based racial profiling by police. Civil rights matter, but until crime patterns
are uniform across groups, police, and others, will continue, in the absence of
other information, to draw inferences on what they can see. Two things coming up will help here – cameras
on police officers to record what they actually do, and more and more
legalization of marijuana, which will end much of what has been a silly “war”
anyway.
Five, any and all worries about American inflation. With a $17 trillion national debt, our
government has about the strongest vested interest in keeping interest rates
low we will ever see. True, there is a
lot of money out there, but where is it going?
However, monsters we should
all fear, this time of the year, are political candidates who don’t care about
jobs. Fewer give employment as high a
priority as in 2010 or 2012, and that’s understandable, but all running for
legislative office outside of, say, North Dakota should be aware finding work
is a real problem for many. Hide from that
kind!
As of last night, there is one more we don’t need to fear
either. The man strongly believed to
have laid in wait for and shot two Pennsylvania state troopers in front of
their barracks has, after seven weeks, been captured. That was actually a local issue here – the
whole scene was close enough to us that for a while Eldred schools were under
special guard. Entire hunting seasons at
some locations, cutting out not only local recreation but a real income source
for many in these economically weak areas, and numerous community events,
including trick-or-treating, were cancelled.
Now, though, we can celebrate Halloween - with one less monster. Let’s do that.