Halloween rant

This is a day long, considering yesterday was Halloween, but a Tuesday TV news story really wrinkled my journalism thinking. The story was one of those annual Halloween safety things that has been TV staple since the late 1970s, when unsubstantiated stories first started rumoring around.

Thirty-something years ago a newspaper somewhere in the Midwest ran a story about poisoned Halloween candy and razor blades in apples and oranges given to kids doing trick or treat.

Stories about kids and danger-danger Will Robinson take a life of their own, since we became a society of fear, maybe when Commies were in closets, maybe the somewhat inherent racism of the country – black folks moving into the neighborhood or white folks always keeping a brother down.

After the poison and razor blades, newspapers began a new necessity – the somebody’s gonna get your kids stories at the end of October. TV news picked up the stories, or made their own, each medium finding public safety officials to talk about safety and psychologists to educate us masses on why crazy people do what they do.

I can’t recall a single verified incident of a madman giving poisoned candy or bladed fruit to trick or treat kids, but truth always takes a back seat to public fear. Add in sexual predators, and you have the makings for several days of stories.

The TV story was on a Little Rock station, the lead story, with an anchorperson talking about Halloween and candy and how can parents know which places are safe? Segue to a reporter person who talks about a telephone application that enables you to find where registered sex criminals live. The reporter person then was standing in front of a boarded-up house in a poor neighborhood, saying some addresses obviously were wrong.

Then (this is the really good part), the reporter person was standing in an upper-middle class neighborhood, in front of a half-million-dollar house, commenting on safe neighborhoods, and two kids were sitting on the concrete driveway, next to the street.

Here’s a reality: Parents in $500,000 houses do not let their kids sit on the driveway near the street in the middle of the afternoon. And another reality: Kids who live in $500,000 houses do not sit on the driveway. Ever. That’s why video games were invented – to keep kids off driveways.

Here are a couple more realities: Parents know whether all or parts of their neighborhood are safe, and they don’t let Halloween kids go in the unsafe parts.

Watching the TV news story, Priscilla said, “Is she saying poor neighborhoods are unsafe, but richer ones are safe for kids?”

Yes, she was.

And in Little Rock, Arkansas, we know who lives in which neighborhood.