Glitter, Ghosts, and Ghouls
I don’t know if there will be many trick-or-treaters tonight. The tradition of going house to house to beg for candy has long since fallen out of vogue. Collingswood has a population of about a bazillion kids, so I bought ten or fifteen pounds of candy, just in case I get hungry later.
Living around so many young children has opened my eyes to yet another problem with social media. All the grownups have become so addicted to screens and fighting about politics that we’re deeply neglecting the children. Individually, people are looking after their kids about the same as ever, but as a society, we adults are doing a dreadful job of looking after them and the world they’re growing into.
We’re behaving as though they’re not even real people. We’ve turned them into political hypotheticals and props for conspiracy theory and cultural polemic. But I can vouch that they’re real people, albeit quite small. I see them running and skipping all over the neighborhood. Sometimes they’re even on bicycles or scooters. These little people are totally real. And extremely weird, but that’s not the point. We need to do better by them, and not condemn them to an angry world of noisy idiots trapped inside their phones.
Postscriptum: I have never seen so many children in my life. There must have been two bazillion of them.