“Hallowe’en.” Postcard, ca. 1910. Missouri History Museum 

The giant Halloween toys that were nowhere to be seen when I was a boy have multiplied in recent years in proportion to the real horrors that generations of soft-headed Americans have permitted to overtake their children, their culture and their nation.

[Reposted from October, 2021]

ALAN writes:

When I was a boy, American grown-ups did not decorate their homes, lawns, and yards with extravagant Halloween toys and displays, as they do today.  Such people spend considerable time and expense on pretend-horrors: ghosts, goblins, witches, spooks, skeletons, spider webs, graveyards, and coffins. Such toys begin to appear on lawns in early September. Parents who imagine they are grown-up compete with each other to stage the most outlandish and bizarre spectacles of pretend-horror.

That should tell us something about the moral-philosophical frame of mind of such people. If my grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles could see such ostentatious displays, they would conclude:  Americans have become a nation of infants.

People who do such things might argue that they are making Halloween more fun for their children than it was for them. Is that so? They may claim that children deserve more fun at a moment in American life as difficult and trying as this one.  How superior they must imagine themselves to parents a hundred years ago who could give their children “only” books of stories without pictures or who could “only” read stories aloud to their children. I suggest modern parents have it backward.

Childhood imagination is a source of rich wonder, curiosity, delight, possibility, beauty, and inspiration—if it is not pre-empted or short-circuited by grown-ups.

Up to approximately the years when Americans invented the “teenager” and allowed an entire subculture to arise around that weird species, it was common for grown-ups to expect children to depend on their imagination for entertainment and inspiration.  Halloween in those years was a much more modest affair than it is today.  It is not evident that children who grew up in that former setting suffered from impoverishment of imagination or too little fun.  On the contrary:  Many people who grew up in those years recall how much enjoyment they found in making up stories and adventures and characters out of their imagination.

How could children today do that when their parents flood them with yards-full of oversize Halloween toys? What is left for such children to imagine? Do such toys not constrict childhood imagination? Do they not reduce or destroy outright the magical allure to children of what cannot be seen but imagined?  I venture the guess that those are generally the same kinds of parents who see nothing wrong in planting their babies and children in front of TV screens. Thus is the potent but delicate structure of childhood imagination effectively annihilated by modern parents, encouraged of course by the toy manufacturing industry and the mass communications and entertainment industries.

The more thoughtful children in today’s world might wonder why grown-ups devote so much energy and expense to creating pretend-horrors like extravagant Halloween toys and displays and so little energy and determination to controlling real horrors like lawlessness, vandalism, crime, lowered standards of competence, lowered expectations, widespread contempt for rules and laws, degenerate schools, degenerate music and entertainment, the destruction of historic statues, medical racketeering, government tyranny, and the horrors that DIE agitators (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) have brought to previously-civilized towns and cities.

Is that a measure of what it means to become grown-up?, such children might wonder. To accommodate people who want to destroy what our ancestors created?  To apologize for the magnificent achievements and virtues of our ancestors?  To accommodate people who aim to kill us and take over our nation?

In what sense can such people be said to be grown-up?, those children might wonder.

The giant Halloween toys that were nowhere to be seen when I was a boy have multiplied in recent years in proportion to the real horrors that generations of soft-headed Americans have permitted to overtake their culture and their nation.

The second greatest horror American children today will ever see is the Nightmare World into which they were born, a horror made possible by three generations of their elders who proved beyond doubt how much they hated responsibility, hated the responsibility of enforcing rules and laws, and hated the responsibility of saying NO to bad ideas and suicidal cultural trends and understanding why they should have said it.

The greatest horror they will ever see is unfolding right now in front of them: Gangs of thugs and bureaucrats and racketeers and “doctors” and militant feminists who want to inject poison into their bodies and into all Americans. We are now witness to the greatest and most aggressive seizure of tyrannical power in all recorded history, accomplished by means of name-calling, intimidation, character smearing, coercion, blackmail, threats, bribes, fake medicine, fake science, fake vaccines, and the calculated obliteration of the rights and liberty that early generations of Americans took pains to establish and solidify into American law.

Worse: Most of their elders now show how agreeably they will take orders from such thugs and tyrants.  Not to mention the absurdity of American so-called grown-ups agreeing to wear masks and demanding that their children wear masks, beyond a doubt one of the greatest insults American children have ever had inflicted on them by people who claim to be their guardians.

Does that qualify as pretend-horror or real horror?

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