TPing Halloween

Neon Memes • The ancient druids believed that bound'ries decay'd on this night each year and that the spirits of the dead terrorized the land of the living. If only! Over time, Halloween―which no longer appears to hallow anything―has degenerated to something far worse than a ghoul gala, a celebration of almost singular repugnance for at least five reasons: (1) Halloween encourages already overweight or even obese children to gorge themselves on the empty calories of processed sugar in most if not all "treats." (2) Trick-or-treating increasingly prompts American youngsters to adopt a something-for-nothing viewpoint and an unreasoning and unreasonable, even laughable, sense of entitlement. (3) Like New Year's Eve, Halloween inspires certain putative adults to behave in dangerously immature ways―not least of them drinking and driving. (4) Economically, the preliminaries to the holiday―which begin in September, if not sooner―mark the start of the mad-dog commercialization that nowadays bloodies the last quarter of each year. (5) Perhaps most egregiously, Halloween fosters the naive notion that people mask themselves only on specified, infrequent occasions. ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor