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Dalton
Roberts |
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Halloween is good for
us. It gives us a chance to laugh at our fears and if there is any way
to deal effectively with fear other than laughter, no one has discovered
it. There was a time I
thought it not good to celebrate Halloween. It teaches children
extortion -- ”give me a treat or I’ll play a trick on you.” But if
they don’t learn the fine art of extortion at Halloween, they will
learn it when they go to school. You know, “get those grades up or
we’ll be sliding your meals under the door of your room.” Thank goodness,
Halloween has tamed down a lot since my childhood. We would turn over
outhouses, put manure from Sterchi’s pasture into a big grocery bag,
roll the top into a big paper cigar, set it on fire and set it on
porches. When the recipients ran out and stomped out the fire their
shoes got pretty pasture-ized. One of the worst
things we did was to drag limbs out on the roads at sharp curves. This
karma came home to me one Halloween when I was driving around Wise
Mountain in Virginia. Around a hairpin curve, large boulders had been
placed all across the road. There was no way I could miss them.
Fortunately I was wearing a seat belt and after hitting them, becoming
airborne and coming back down on the road, I was able to retain control
of the car. It stripped out my radiator, transmission, gas tank and rear
bumper, totaling the car. This taught me the
wisdom of seat belt laws. It sounds beautifully libertarian to say
“the government has no right to make me wear a seat belt” but
doesn’t the public have the right through their elected
representatives to keep us from killing others? In a collision, one can
be slung out of the drivers seat and bounced around inside the car like
a boiled egg rolling down the hill in a tin can. There is no way you can
hang onto the steering wheel and control the car under those
circumstances. We can use Halloween
to give ourselves some adrenalin without endangering each other’s
lives. That’s the real reason we celebrate it. We are addicted to
little squirts of adrenalin. We seek relief from the humdrum in many
ways and one of the quickest ways is to set ourselves up for a big
scare. My personal
psychiatrist, Dr. Ziggman Frogg, says man has five basic needs: food,
sex, shelter, awe and terror. In all these ways he seeks liberation from
the repetitive, routine, mundane pounding of reality. Nothing rockets
him out of the rut of numbing daily rounds quicker than a good scream.
Stephen King realized this and made his fortune putting the cattle prod
to our adrenals. Halloween is really a respite from the
scariness of the world. No Halloween tricks can equal the tricks being
played on us by “leaders” all over the world. We can be positive
thinkers and still acknowledge the terrors we live with. We thought the
cold war with Russia with all its nuclear threats was frightening, and
it was. Remember those school drills where we learned the safest ways to
die in case of a nuclear attack? The fear of Russia has now morphed into
fear of small groups of maniacs detonating nuclear devices, bacteria
bombs, or a thousand and one other ways to kill and maim. We hear political
rhetoric about which candidate can best protect us from terrorists. The
harsh reality is that no one can. If enough people hate you with a
vengeance, they can find a million ways to kill you. Yes, we can
retaliate for terrorist acts but it will not burn out the nests of those
who sting us. Maybe the giggly
scares of Halloween will divert our attention away from this
pumpkin-faced world and help us not crawl under the bed after the six
o’clock news. Check out Dalton's
website www.daltonroberts.com
and his gathered writings aat www.ipsfeatures.com.
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