Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania

Trunk or Treat?

Is that a weird typo, I wondered, or something else? Turns out something else: more of America's growing paranoia. "Trunk or Treat" events are replacing the tradition of children going about on foot in their neighborhoods on Halloween to collect handouts of candy and other treats. It seems folks have decided that's too dangerous. People instead should gather in a church parking lot and hand out the goodies from the trunks of their cars. The kids remain continuously under the watchful parental gaze. Just what sort of evil they think is lurking in the suburban neighborhoods surrounding Punxsutawney, PA, escapes me.

This fits in with the now familiar scene in the morning in my town, where half a dozen large SUVs sit idling, waiting for the school bus, each with an adult and one or more kids inside. Each is also fully visible from every house on the cul de sac, but each family unit sits in its own idling steel cocoon. When the bus returns kids from school along a country road, the driver doesn't let children off the bus until an adult appears in the doorway or foot of the driveway. Nearly fifty years ago I lived near the terminus of a dead-end street and was supposed to walk half a mile out to the main road where the school bus stopped to pick up all the kids who lived on Ridge Road. Only in the very worst weather would a parent ever drive a kid to the bus stop. It would never occur to anyone to wait with the kids for the bus. School was half a mile west, but the bus continued to the east to a number of other pickup spots before finally winding up at school. This annoyed me so much that I routinely just walked through the woods directly from my house to school. Not once was I ever kidnapped and held for ransom. But I guess today such a trick would send me straight to the Principal's Office, if not all the way to reform school. I don't think I'd enjoy this aspect of being a child today.