Trick or treating and the art of accepting getting old

I’ve been making a lot of back-in-my-day statements lately. They are rarely thoughts about how hard times were; the walk to school 5 miles in 5 feet of snow thoughts. They are mostly how things were much better during my childhood, but that’s a logical fallacy. 

When people look back on the more innocent times, they are often looking back on those times through innocent eyes of a child. All of the horrors of the world that exist today existed then, but the difference between then and modern times is that today we are more aware of the horrors due to technology. 

Are we more predisposed to being beaten by police today? No, we’re just more aware of it from seeing videos on the Internet. Are there more child molesters today than before? No, the authorities just have better technology to catch them than before and the public is far more aware of the issue. Is there more crime today than before? No, statistics from the department of justice show this is one of the safest times to be alive in the history of mankind.

The world is not spinning on the edge of a toilet as its ever widening gyre pulls it  closer to the drain.  It’s this fear of doom that makes people want to Nerf the world and create safe places, where children never learn to face adversity. This is no more evident than how modern people celebrate Halloween.

Back in my day, my mother didn’t allow me to go trick-or-treating until it was dark. Nowadays, kids stop when it gets dark. We stayed out until people started running out of candy or turning off their porch lights. Halloween wasn’t fun because of the costumes or candy. It was fun because it was the one time a year that children owned the night. 

We walked with confidence as we crossed the roads and became leery of every bush for fear of some human or animatronic device may jump out to scare us. There were urban legends about poisoned candy and van-driving kidnappers, but none of that scared us. It’s about time we give Halloween back to the kids and stop letting the fear mongering media trap us in our own homes.