Tuesday, October 9, 2012

From The Archives: Halloween--The Perfect Time To Train A Pussy? - By Matty Jacobson

Matty Jacobson edits and contributes to
The Skewed Review.
THE SKEWED REVIEW | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | HEALTH & WELLNESS | COLLEGE LIFE



The future of the human race is bound for sissyism, so let's just get used to it right now.

My roommates and I have been preparing our house for the upcoming Halloween holiday, and let me tell you it's a trick-or-treater's dream. Our house has a black light show, glow-in-the-dark spider webs, a graveyard out front, realistically gory props, and dozens of jack-o-lanterns. On top of that we've got the good candy at our house.

All of this is great for the neighborhood children, assuming their parents let them go trick-or-treating these days.

But for all the money we spent on decorations this year, I fear we may not be using much of the décor to spook the local kids. Kids these days are just a bunch of sissies who are being raised by overprotective parents, and this could lead to little or no trick-or-treaters at our front door. This could also lead to a future of jelly-spined wimps, but I'll get to that later.

Every Halloween I remember my own childhood. I recall getting all decked out in whatever costume I'd picked off the Kmart shelf that year and heading out the door with my siblings and friends to get that load of candy.

I distinctly remember we were never out before the sun set, and neither were the rest of the neighborhood kids for that matter.

Our costumes were almost exclusively black, so we blended into the night perfectly. No car would have seen us. And back then flashlights were for the rich kids. No, we all depended on the street lamps for illumination, if in fact there were any.

We'd be out for hours on end, and there were never any Amber Alerts in our honor. When we came home my parents never checked my candy unless it was to unwrap it and eat it themselves, and there were a couple of years when I returned home after my parents were already asleep. Big surprise, the authorities were not notified.

Those were the good old days.

Today, however, that story has changed. Halloween is no longer the blissfully demonic night when kids roamed the streets until all hours gathering candy and toilet papering houses. Now, at 4 p.m. you'll see kids waddling down the street with both parents in tow. The kids' chubby little hands will be full of lit flashlights (despite it being daytime), iPhones (in case someone has to call 9-1-1), and maybe even a bag for gathering candy. You'll never be able to figure out what their costumes are because they're wrapped in so much Day-Glo reflective tape that they look like radioactive mummies. The whole excursion will be done in about an hour because the kids won't be allowed out after dark.

And that's if the children are allowed to go trick-or-treating at all. In my neighborhood there is an event called "trunk-or-treat" where the neighborhood parents park their cars in a church parking lot and hand out candy from the trunks of their vehicles.

Oh yeah, that's a lot of fun. 

I actually participated in this event last year for my brother's kids. Since there are only a certain amount of cars you can fit in a parking lot, the kids would just go in continuous circles collecting the same candy from the same cars over and over and over again.

That kind of monotony breeds serial killers people!

I'm pulling out the time-machine review for this one. Overprotective parents who never let their children out of their sight should get whisked away to their own childhoods. The catch is they will have to live their childhoods the way they raise their children. It's a perspective thing.

But it isn't just Halloween. As a society we are on a slippery slope to creating a world full of whiners.

Everyone has to have a fair chance and nobody is allowed to get his or her feelings hurt. What does it teach the adults of the future when the adults of today make everything out to be villainous? I'll tell you: It teaches those kids to be scared of everything and rely on other people far too much.

I mean, look at me! I love to whine, and I wasn't even raised by overprotective parents. Imagine if I had?

I know most of you are years away from having children, but you need to start conditioning yourselves today to raise the society of tomorrow.

When you are sitting in the old folks' home watching 24-hour cable news, do you really want to see a world infested with people wearing bike reflectors in the day and helmets while walking around? What about people who don't keep score in games anymore because that would hurt someone's feelings, or people who don't venture out at night because there may be a murderer around every corner?

The only possible upside I see to this future is that any predatory traits will definitely be bred out of people because everyone in the future will be a sniveling sissy.

Here's hoping there are at least a couple of parents in my neighborhood who will allow their kids to come trick-or-treating so we can show off our really super-rad Halloween house to at least somebody.


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