Not all is lost yet but I feel ya, man. I think Halloween should be an occasion to wear costumes that are inventive and scary as all hell. It's about death and demons, baby, not firemen and star wars characters. The funny thing is that voilent and sexual crimes and abductions are at a 40-year low, so statistically it's safer now than ever to let your kids trick or treat after dark with their friends, but of course we don't have the Russians to report on every night now that that persky cold war is over, so instead we just hear more about the crime in the U.S. that is at a nearly all-time low.
{rant about the cold war and some further subject-related content follows, please skip if you're not interested, because I'm not trying to hijack this guy's thread}
For those of you not alive to have been conscious of the news during the cold war, people lived in a constant, very state of real fear of being nuke-bombed at any time by the Russkies, and half the national news every single fucking night was Russia this, Russia that. They were the big bad guys who were going to kill us all with some nuke, or so we thought. This is tough for young people today to understand, and to our detriment, it's not taught in schools what a big psychological impact this had on us...or them. Maybe because we're finally so damn glad it ended. The only consolation people had was that death from a nuke was probably going to be almost instantaneous. I remember when I was kind of forced into explaining to my little step brother, age 7 at the time, it was a tough thing to tell a kid that yes, such bombs existed. He cried in terror and ran to his room. Then again, my only consolation to him after he calmed down was that at the time there was a nearby military base which was probably a target and, true to form, it'd be over before we knew it.
* This post has been modified
: 20 years ago