Halloween is for the adults?

A Halloween Quote of the Week

It's not quite Halloween yet, but many people I know have been preparing for weeks already. Making or reserving rental costumes, planning parties, and putting up sometimes elaborate decorations takes time. That's just for the adults. It really does seem that, more and more in recent years, Halloween is for the adults.

Adults rule the night at the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in New York. This photo is from the 2011 event. Photo by Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images.

No, Halloween's not for kids anymore--if it ever was. I guess there may have been a brief period when it was mostly all for the kiddos. But that's hard to imagine, these days.

Today, grownups are definitely out in large numbers for this holiday. And all across the land, police forces have to be ready. Most lay on extra officers. Some do outreach beforehand to connect with the community and take the opportunity to spread safety tips. An article on Halloween policing gave us our Quote of the Week.

Halloween definitely involves our companion animals, too. A few years ago on this blog, The Artdog did a Countdown to Halloween Pet Safety. It included: #1 Food Safety; #2 Lost Pets; #3 Pet Costumes (if ever there was a sure sign that Halloween is for the adults these days, it's the proliferation of pet costumes, especially in childless homes); #4 Pet Fire Safety (especially including cats in Jack-O-Lanterns); and #5 Electrical Safety.

Even when we involve the kids, dress up the pets, or do any of the other fun things available to do on Halloween, it's still up to the adults in the room to keep everyone safe. So don't go crazy, out there!

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images, via USA Today, for the photo from Greenwich Village. Deepest gratitude to Tithi Luadthong and 123RF for the image that brings the Wyllie quote to life.

Celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day!

Please join me in celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day today.

The official Federal Holiday that has allowed my Beloved to be home today is Columbus Day. Traditionally, it's been celebrated as an Italian-American ethnic celebration, and I heartily believe that Italian-Americans have good reason to be proud of their heritage.

But as anyone who reads this blog regularly is aware, I have serious problems with the idea of making Christopher Columbus the hero of anything. So while I uplift the idea of Italian pride, I'll be celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day today.

I support pride in Italian heritage--but definitely not the glorification of Christopher Columbus, whose arrival sparked a rolling disaster throughout the Americas.

The "Columbian Exchange" created disruption all over the world, some of it positive and some of it negative. There's a strong argument to be made that while it benefitted much of Europe, its effects on the so-called "New World" of the Americas, and ultimately on Africa (especially via colonialism and the slave trade) and the rest of the world were not so benign. It could even be called a disaster for the 90% of indigenous Americans who died from plague after plague for which their immune systems were unprepared.

It was enormously consequential--but it's been egregiously misrepresented in school curricula for literal centuries, although many teachers have begun to grapple with the gaps in the traditional narrative. Still today, however, this information from Scholastic is representative of the kind of things being taught.

It's time to push for a more complete view of history, and more balanced representation. It does need to take root in schools, certainly. But if it's only confined to schools we'll have a "diversity backlash." Some people persist in seeing the narrative of a dominant monoculture as the "most important" part, while anything else is just political correctness run amok.

We have enough of that kind of thinking already. Countering it is a long, slow process, but for me it will include persistently celebrating Indigenous Peoples' Day.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to "World of Wellesley" from Wellesley, MA, for the Indigenous Peoples Day design; to Freedonia State University of New York for the "Columbus Day X-out" image; and to Illuminatives for the infographic about Native American representation in the school curricula of the United States.

Accomplishments of the Labor Movement

Holiday Greetings!

I've spent the past several weeks laboring with intense focus to complete a full, finished draft of A Bone to Pick, the second novel in the XK9 "Bones" Trilogy. (The first book, What's Bred in the Bone, is now available. But pausing from our labors to consider the accomplishments of the labor movement is a big part of the point of Labor Day in the United States.

What are the accomplishments of the labor movement? The list is pretty long, and these freedoms--many of which we now take for granted--were not easily won. It's worth a closer look to consider what ideas, values and privileges established we owe to organized labor.

A list from The Hartmann Report itemizes several categories of accomplishments.

Equity and Social Justice
The labor movement achieved the end of child labor, the right to form unions, and the rights of public sector workers to unionize. Unions supported the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and Title VII Prohibition of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and also passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Family Medical Leave Act.

Things we take for granted
Among the accomplishments of the labor movement are things we today would consider essential.  But never forget that each of them had to be fought for. There was a time when they were not considered to be rights at all. I'm talking about the idea of weekends, the establishment of the 8-hour work week, and also the idea of paying extra for overtime (some of our bosses still haven't gotten that memo, but many have). Likewise, the idea that sick leave, paid vacations, and days off on holidays are rights originated with the labor movement.

Rights that are slipping away, if we're not careful
We may have established a guaranteed minimum wage, but is it a living wage? Low-wage workers currently often have to work several jobs to support themselves and their families, thanks to convoluted arguments that obfuscate and justify unfair practices that have led to growing levels of income inequality.

Pensions are another area of growing uncertainty. Winning pensions for workers was a major accomplishment of the labor movement, but under-funded and poorly-performing pension funds are becoming a national crisis. A related issue, the idea of sick leave, paid vacations, and days off on holidays are rights is eroding away in the gig economy.

And then there's employer-provided health care--another whole can of worms that I'll leave for another day.

IMAGE CREDIT: Many thanks to 123RF for this Labor Day greeting graphic.