The Current State of Academics in America

EDITED TO CORRECT MY ERRORS:

I'm sure most of us have heard about the TA in Oklahoma who gave an Evangelical student a bad grade on her paper because (1) the student's paper did not meet the assignment criteria, which required the student to demonstrate that they had read a specific article, and to write a reaction to that article and (2) the only source the student alluded to was the Christian Bible. (She didn't cite it.)  Among other things, this student apparently said that trans people were demonic.

Evangelicals are having screeching tantrums, even though Oklahoma University is kissing the student's feet and giving her everything she wants. This is discrimination, you see, to require a student to write a paper that fits the assignment.

ETA: Also, apparently this student's mother works for Turning Point, and the student may have taken the class in order to get the instructor (who is trans) fired.

ETA: I also once had a student refuse to read an assignment (a James Baldwin short story) because reading it went against her religion. (It had the words 'damn' and 'hell' in it.) I failed the student for that assignment, and my university supported me. AS THEY SHOULD.

In my last few years of teaching, I had a student very much like this one. She wanted to write a paper explaining how Jesus was an historical figure. I discouraged her from choosing this topic, because I said she would not be able to find legitimate sources to support that claim. She insisted she could. Reluctantly, I allowed the topic.

What sources did she cite? You guessed it. Verses from the Bible and an interview with her pastor. I taught students to write papers by doing several drafts with them and holding conferences. Over and over, I told her she either had to find legitimate sources -- not the Bible, not her preacher, but sources published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals -- if she wanted to stick with this topic.

She ended up with a very low grade on the paper, because not only did she never find -- or as far as I could tell, try to find -- reputable sources, she couldn't write a grammatically correct complete sentence or a structurally correct paragraph either. Because that was the major paper for the semester, she had to repeat the class. She didn't complain to the dean, fortunately for me, because -- like OU -- I suspect my dean would have caved.

After that semester, I began assigning topics instead of letting students choose what they wanted to write about. I still got a lot of terrible papers, but at least none of them could accuse me of failing them because they love Jesus.

This TA clearly is doing a great deal right -- requiring legitimate sources, explaining clearly and calmly how the student's paper does not meet the criteria. I would not, myself, have allowed a student to write about why trans people should not exist, but she is a student herself, and still finding her way. At her age, I did indeed allow topics like that, but I always knew my university would support me if I treated the student fairly (as this TA did). Now every Evangelical/MAGA student knows they just have to claim that they are being persecuted for their religion and the university will fall over its feet giving them whatever they want.

There is no way to educate students if this is how the system works. 

Social Commentary

I now live, as many of you know, in the nearest thing to a socialist city you're going to find in Arkansas. Our governor and legislature and much of the rest of this MAGA state hate us with a passion because so many progressives/hippies/liberals live here that it's easy to fund our library, the bike trails, the free busses and the food banks.

And yet. People are homeless here. People are living in their cars. (I encounter them often, since I go early to the dog park, when they're still in the parking lot there.) Some, I am sure, have addiction problems. Many just can't make the rent, which is high in this city, considering it's in Arkansas -- a single shabby one-bedroom rents for $1200/month, and requires passing background checks, providing paystubs, and putting up a sizable deposit as well as the first and last month's rent. Plus you have to sign a year long lease, and if you default before the year is up, you're evicted. Trying getting another apartment with an eviction on your record.

(Why so pricey? Everyone wants to live here, and then also we have a yearly influx of rich kids from Texas who come to attend our R-1 university, probably not because it's a good university as because it's got the Razorbacks. Razorback football is a cult.)

The city is working at building (a) affordable housing and (b) affordable housing aimed specifically at artists. This is what cities should be doing, obviously, but it's not here yet.

A lot of the people living in their cars, or occasionally in tents deep in the trees around the dog park, have jobs. Many also drive for door dash or deliver for Amazon. They're not "lazy," and they're not "illegal immigrants." They're unable to rent an apartment on minimum wage plus a side hustle. (We do have immigrants, but they're mostly working construction, which I assume pays better.)

Are they hungry? They're not eating well, I can guess that from the fast food wrappers scattered around their cars. (There are trash cans, but I guess I might not want to get out of my car when it's 20 degrees out either.) Food banks are useful, but frequently they require a kitchen, which someone living in their car will not have. They don't look healthy, or happy, on the few occasions I see one stumbling back from the single bathroom in the park.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I saw this clip from 1984*, over on PZ Myers' site. It reminded me of a boyfriend I had at about the same time -- 1983, this would have me -- who assured me that no one starved in America, no one was hungry in America. I didn't know enough to push back at him. My own brother said the same thing, a few years later: people were homeless in America because they wanted to be. None of them were starving, or even hungry.

I'm hearing the same rhetoric from conservatives today. MAGA conservatives, anyway. People are homeless because they choose to be homeless. People begging on the street corners are making a fortune, they all have nice cars and five bedroom homes. People going to food banks are driving there in BMWs.

It's the Welfare Queen lie Reagan started in 1980. MAGA loves to believe it because it justifies their bigotry. It's okay to persecute the poor and the immigrants, it's okay to strip food assistance from people because those people are just junkies anyway, spending their money on cigarettes and booze. Hate becomes a virtue in their little bubble. That so many of them claim to be Christian is pretty...I was going to say hilarious, but actually it's disgusting.

They aren't just disgusting. They're immoral.

*I'll tell you what really astonished me about that clip -- how polite Pryor was the the wealthy old lady. He treated her with so much respect. I'd have lost it by the second lie she told. He slips a bit when she tries to take the moral high ground, but he's still saying, "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," to the very end.

Random Sunday Stuff

Thanksgiving went well, though I had to open the windows because so much cooking made the house too hot. Also, Dr Skull got stove up from the cooking, even though we did as much of the actual work as possible.

It was extremely cold -- well below 30 -- when I took the dog to the park this morning. He loves the cold. He got the zoomies and would have leapt into the (ice-crusted) pond if I hadn't yelped in alarm.

I need to go to the library today. But it is SO COLD. Hovering at 32 right now, with a sharp wind. Also sunshine, though, so maybe things will warm up by this afternoon.

Thanksgiving Morn

I took the dog on a frosty walk before sunrise and since then have been involved in preparations for dinner, even though in theory I have very little to do with the cooking. But Dr Skull is not able to use his hands well at the moment, so I am doing a lot of prep work for the dishes he is cooking.

It is beautiful weather here: about 50 degrees, sunny and crisp.

My part of the menu:

Bread

Sweet potatoes

Dr Skull's part:

Butternut squash soup

Cornbread stuffing

Pumpkin pie

(I made the cornbread and peeled and cut up the squash. I will probably roll out the pie crust as well.)

The kid:

Mac & cheese

Brussel's sprouts

Mashed Potatoes

The Turkey

The kid's husband:

deviled eggs

Uncle Charger is coming to dinner as well.

Novel Revision Submitted

I sent off the revision of the third Velocity novel (titled Down the Core) yesterday and so today I am at loose ends. I have reviews to write, of course, and I suppose I could do all the things I put off so I could work on the novel non-stop, like cleaning the bathrooms and dealing with the recycling.

Or I could re-read novels and drink hot tea. Maybe take a nap later.

Hmm, hard decision.

What I'm Reading Now

Stella Hayward, The Good Boy

On her 30th birthday, a woman is granted a wish by her magical grandmother. This is a family tradition -- every grandmother gives every granddaughter a wish on their 30 birthday. But Genie, a bit drunk and traumatized by life, accidentally wishes her beloved dog was human -- and voila! 

This is an adorable book. The best part is Rory, the dog turned human who still acts and thinks like a dog. He's a golden retriever with his own traumatized past, and he's just great. (The trauma is off the page and kept non-explicit.) There's a romance (not with Rory) and it's fine and charming as well, but Rory is the best part. If you're looking for a well-written, charming read with a happy ending, this is your book.

Elly Griffith, The Frozen People

This is sort of science fiction, so I suppose I could have included it in one of my review columns. But it's really SF-ish, so I decided not to. It's a good book, mind you, and kept me interested all the way through -- this division in the English civil service handles "cold" cases (so cold they're frozen, get it), by which they mean cases that can only be handled by sending witnesses back through time to observe the murder. That's the only science-fictional part about the novel, the time travel. Otherwise it's a straight-up murder mystery.

The main plot concerns a powerful minister in the government, bruited as a possible Prime Minister some day, who is writing a book about his family history and wants to clear up the rumor that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a serial killer. So our main character is sent back to 1850 to act as a witness, and gets stuck there. Meanwhile in the future/present, the minister is murdered. Are the two connected?

I love time travel novels anyway, but this one is also very well done. Good writing, great characters, and a couple of cranky cats. If you like a little SF in your murder mystery, this might be worth picking up.

Helen DeWitt, The English Understand Wool

Helen DeWitt wrote one of my favorite books, The Last Samurai. This is a bit different, and much shorter (really a novella) but every bit as good. An 18 year old, raised in Morocco and various cities (Paris, London) by fabulously wealthy parents, reared by those parents to be spectacularly well-bred (never doing anything mauvais ton), suddenly learns that (a) her parents are not her parents and (b) she has very little money left indeed. What she does about it is one of the surprises of the book. 

As with Samurai, DeWitt plays with form and structure here. She does it very well. This book is a delight, and it's short enough to read in a few hours. 10/10, no notes.

Emma Straub, This Time Tomorrow

This one is also (sort of) science fiction/fantasy. A woman on the eve of her 40th birthday figures out how to return to her 16th birthday. There's a portal, sort of. But it will only ever take her back to that one day, her 16th birthday. She can, however, change things, which changes her life in the future. The one thing she keeps trying to change is the death of her father, who in the initial story is dying of lung cancer. The thematic arc is she has to learn to accept her father's death. 

It's not a bad book -- nice writing, and the characters are pretty well done. But it's the kind of SFF which people who don't read much SFF end up writing. (To her credit, Straub knows this and lampshades it in the book.) The science fiction convention that features heavily in the various timelines is really well done. Straub's father is Peter Straub, so that makes sense. 

The notion of 1996 being the ancient past kind sent me.

Harper Lee, The Land of Sweet Forever

I read this one so you won't have to. Lee is famous for having written every high school teacher's favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird (I also loved this book as a kid) and then never publishing anything else. Because of this, it was a truism among the (male) writers in my MFA program that Truman Capote had "actually" written Mockingbird. 

Anyway, now that Lee is dead, her heirs are publishing her trunk novels and uncollected works, including Go Set a Watchman in 2015 and this collection of short stories and essays this year. It contains several short stories written when Lee first started writing, none of them terrible but none of them very good, and several pretty bad essays about nothing in particular. 

Only read this if you're a completist like me.

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I read this as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, so this is a re-read.

It's a lovely book. Joyce writes like an angel. Sadly, this one is overshadowed by his (incoherent and frankly overrated) later novels. If you actually like to read and don't just want to look like a hipster, this one and his short stories are where you should spent your time.

Deer

 Two deer were grazing out behind my house this morning:

There were also two squirrels in that tree. Shamus was in a puppy quandary -- which to bark at first?

Reading Before the Internet

Getting a review copy of Martha Wells' new book in literal seconds made me think about the world previous to the internet, when probably I wouldn't even have found out Wells had a new Murderbot book coming out until I stumbled across it in the New Fiction section of my library branch.

That's if my library happened to buy the book. Not always a given.

Back before the internet, if the library didn't have a book, I didn't have any way to find that book. Often I didn't even know that book existed. I do remember looking at the front of books I liked, where there was often a list of other books written by that author. Then I could (1) fill out interlibrary loan books and sometimes the library would find me a copy or (2) hunt used bookstores, hoping to run across a book or (3) go to the Walden's in the mall. This was after the Walden's bookstore opened in the mall, when I was about thirteen, I think. And Walden's didn't usually have the book anyway.

There were no bookstores anywhere within my reach before I was old enough to ride busses on my own (again, around 13). Drugstores had a section with paperback novels, as did the 7-11 about a mile from my house, and I would sometimes get books there. But mainly I got books from the library and from used bookstores.

When I was in graduate school, I ran across a catalogue for a company that sold books through the mail. I can't remember the name of the company now, and usually the books weren't the kind I wanted to read, but I do remember the delight with which I greeted this catalogue every month.

Amazon began selling books in 1998, the internet tells me. That sounds about right. I didn't really become internet savvy until around 2000, but one of the first things I hooked into was online bookstores. One of these was Alibris, I think. I don't think I started buying books from Amazon for another couple years. 

I was still haunting used bookstores and relying on my local public library at that point. We were in Charlotte, NC, which has an amazing public library. And they would buy any book I asked them to. Our local library here will do that too, or at least so far they have.

There were also more bookstores in Charlotte I could get to, since I could drive. Charlotte had a lot of bookstores. Here, there's only one, and it's a Barnes & Noble, which usually doesn't have any books I want to read, though I do get my magazines there.

I still rely on my public library for a lot of the books I read. But now if I want a book and I know it exists, I can usually get it -- from Amazon, in a few seconds if I'm okay with reading an e-copy; from Thrift Books or other sites in a few days or weeks if I want a hard copy. 

There is also a great used bookstore here, the Dickson Street Bookshop, which I bought tons of books from when I was in graduate school and still visit sometimes.

In whatever ways the future has disappointed me (waves at everything happening in the country), thirteen year old me would have loved this aspect of 2025. No flying cars, meh, okay. But the books I can have!

Not to mention phones and tablets. Honestly I'd rather have these than flying cars.

Wooooo!

I scored a review copy of Martha Wells' new Murderbot book, Platform Decay. WOOOO!

That's my Friday night sorted.

Buy Comic Now!

Support my artist son! Support an independent artist! Support a trans artist!

Beautiful and disturbing horror comic about a pregnant trans man living with an abusive wife and a ghost.

It's available on Ko-Fi and domestic shipping is free.

Other work available on the same page, including stickers and mini-comics. Get'em while they're hot!

Apropos of Nothing

This morning I was remembering a period of about nine or ten months in my 20s when, as a new feminist, I was determined to stop being "nice" and deferential. I quit laughing at things men said, for example. And I didn't smile as a reflex, just because I was a woman and my face was in public. And I started arguing. I did not stay quiet when I thought people were wrong. 

But also, I would take a stand and hold that position, refusing to give in even when I knew I was wrong.

I must have been so insufferable.

Sorry, everyone who knew me then.

But How To Retire?

Over on Reddit, someone asked an apparently sincere question: "If I don't start drawing my social security until I'm 70, how can I retire at 65?"

The longer question was that this person was seeing other people retire at 65 and did not understand how they were doing it.

I can't believe that level of cluelessness is actual. But maybe this person was like 20? Who knows.

The replies were all like, well, when we were in our 30s we didn't buy boats or jetskis or immense houses, we didn't spend a month in France, we put our excess money in the stockmarket and....

The notion that people exist in America who do not have "excess" money appeared nowhere in the discussion. I mean, I was making a middle-class salary (sort of) and there were many (many, many) months when we barely made it to payday. When the car broke down or someone got seriously ill, we had to put that on credit cards. "Just don't buy it if you can't afford it" did not apply.

I was only able to retire at 65 because I inherited my father's money. If I had to depend on social security, I would never have been able to retire. Never. My SS check is just a little over two thousand a month and if I had retired at 70 it would have been a little under 3000 a month. Try living on that.

I do have TIAA money, which has had from three to five percent of my salary per month added to it since I was a baby professor back in 1995. (There was frequently an option to increase that amount, sometimes by as much as five percent more, but we could never afford to do without those $$$.) TIAA pays out another couple thousand a month. We could have scraped by on that, maybe. 

But we couldn't have afforded six hundred a month for Medicare Part B, D, and G on four thousand dollars a month, and frankly we're only doing as well as we are right now because (due to my father's money) I can afford to buy those. If we had to depend on Medicare A (the only one the government pays for) we'd be literally thousands of dollars in debt right now.

If you're depending solely on your social security, you can't retire. Period. 

Heat Wave

High of 76 today and 80 tomorrow. UGH.

After that, winter returns.

Destructo Dog

Of course, when you get a puppy, you can count on losing at least a few items to their need to destroy the world.

So far Shamus has chewed up:

(1) One of my Birkenstocks

(2) A stuffed tiger that was a gift to Dr Skull

(3) My favorite blanket which I crocheted last winter

(4) About fifteen of his own toys, which, fine

(5) One of Dr Skull's slippers

(6) A book from my childhood which I really never expected to read again but STILL

(7) Dr Skull's copy of Proust's A la recherche de temps perdu, which he claims he was reading

He's now eight months old, weighs 50 pounds, and would love to spend his life sitting on my lap and chewing on my fingers.

Such a good dog!

Winter Arrives

Or I guess it's a false winter, to go with the false fall we had earlier: i's 38 degrees here now, going down to 20 degrees tonight. A high tomorrow in the 40s. 

My kind of weather, though when I took the dog to the dog park this morning at dawn, it was too cold even for me. Tomorrow I'll have to wear my winter gear.

Tonight I'm making a chicken pie for dinner. Soon it will be time to make soups and beans.

Dawn is Nice

I've become one of those people who wakes up early even though they don't have to.

Partly this is the dog, who wakes up at six every morning and starts demanding his walk. Partly this is because I have a nice medication (Temazepam) which for the first time in my life lets me lie down and go to sleep, like in ten minutes. (Before I always lay awake for two or three hours, or got up again and stayed up until three a.m.) 

Partly, I think, it's because I don't have to get up. There's no alarm clock, and nothing to  resent. When I wake up, the whole day is mine. I could go back to sleep (the dog, though), but why would I? I have coffee to drink and walks to take and writing to do.

So I'm up at six, usually, or sometimes as late as seven, and off to the dog park ten minutes later and by 8:00 I am at my computer, hot tea at hand, ready to start writing.

This is the life I always wanted, and I have to tell you, it's paradise.

Also, I'm seeing dawn, like, a lot. Almost every day. Dawn is very pretty indeed, y'all.

Random Thoughts

(1) The trees are lovely in Fayetteville right now -- brilliant red-orange, yellow, and red. I like driving around town right now because every time I turn a corner, it's like wow, another beautiful tree.

(2) Conservatives are posting about how young voters will be sorry for voting for Mandami because he'll broadcast Muslim calls to prayer five times a day everywhere. Like church bells, I guess. Horrors.

(3) Liberals keep putting little stories on my FB feed about how this school district or that one is making it illegal to call kids by their "preferred names," and then adding a gotcha about JD Vance not going by his birth name. What they don't get, obviously, is that to conservatives this is not a gotcha. Of course these laws do not apply to them. They're not meant to apply to them. The laws protect, but do not bind them; they bind and do not protect trans people, gay people, or children (or immigrants, or the working class, but neither of those applies in this case).

(4) I'm still in a lot of pain from having the two teeth pulled. The pain medication they gave me only helps a little. 0/10 do not recommend.

(5) Our neighbors keep chickens, including three or four roosters (these are pets, I am pretty sure, not kept for eggs or meat). They roost in the trees of the neighbor's tiny backyard, and sometimes come over to forage in my yard. The roosters crow a lot, which upsets Dr Skull but which I kind of like.

(6) This weekend we're getting a hard freeze. Can't wait.

Scalzi on the Election

Hard agree on this here:

Turns out that out-and-out grifty fascism isn’t, in fact, very popular, especially when the promised benefits of that nonsense — lower food prices and inflation kept in check — are nowhere in sight, and when the only part of the government that is working is the part that floods cities with armed paramilitary violating people’s constitutional rights. 

PZ Myers also has an interesting post, quoting Eugene Debs extensively. (Spoilers: conservatives are clutching their pearls because Mamdani quoted Debs, who honestly I bet 97% of America have never heard of. I have, of course, but I'm one of those educated leftists.)

What Do the People Want?

I gotta say, the delusion from "conservatives" that the people want immigrants deported is pretty bizarre. Most of us know immigrants, and most of us like our immigrant neighbors. 

I mean, not all immigrants, obviously. There are bad people in every group. But I have to say, among the immigrants I know, most of them are hard-working, determined, and not at all whiny. Unlike "conservatives," who blame every trouble (usually imaginary trouble) on someone else. Right now it's immigrants and trans people. Next year it'll be some other group.

But regular people -- which is to say, not weirdos and conspiracy theorists -- are not interested, and in fact oppose, the persecution of immigrants. Regular people are horrified by what ICE is doing. That's one reason the GOP lost bigly yesterday.

Regular people also do not hate and are not horrified by trans people. They're absolutely not interested in laws that persecute that nice kid down the block who just wants to get on with their life.

What do the people want?

(1) A functioning economy, in which what regular people earn matches up with the price of housing and groceries. 

(2) Healthcare that doesn't bankrupt thousands of Americans every year.

(3) Reasonable working hours. The notion that people should have to have two or even three jobs to survive is a real non-starter for most people. 

(4) Time to spend with their families and on their own interests. (See #3)

(5) A government that works for the people, not against them. And maybe one that doesn't fund genocides, either here or abroad.

Doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

Blue Sweep

Apparently the Democrats did well in the elections yesterday (there was no election here in Arkansas), which is somewhat cheering.

Fingers crossed people are waking up to what the GOP actually stands for (which is to say, unbridled bigotry, unbridled liberty for their friends, unbridled oppression for the rest of us. Also, lots of socialism for the very rich, and lots of misery for the poor and working class.)

See PZ Myers for more.

What I'm Watching Now

I'm rewatching Downton Abbey. I don't know why.

It's a very conservative show, with the wealthy people all being saints under their quirkiness, maintaining this huge fortune simply to provide jobs to everyone on the estate. When the new heir (who comes from the middle class) wants to dispense with a valet because why would he need a valet, he gets a stern talking to from the patriarch about depriving someone of their income on such a flimsy excuse.

The servants are all very touchy about their various (really, really) minor indications of status, like who is the first footman and who is the second. Everyone stands up when anyone of higher status enters the service hall. That kind of thing.

On the other hand, it's a low intensity sort of show. When things go wrong, they mostly don't stay wrong. Usually the wrong is only threatened, and then turns out not to happen. Bad things -- really bad things -- don't happen, and everything turns out fine, mostly. Even during WWI, only servants die or are badly injured -- for about half a minute, it looks like the Downton heir will be paralyzed -- and worse, not able to,  you know, have children -- but don't worry, he gets better.

 The exception is Lady Sybil's death, and even that has its impact mitigated by everyone (eventually) behaving well. Even the grumpy patriarch eventually gives in and goes to his grandchild's (Catholic!!) Christening.

And usually it's just things like the dog is lost, and then gets found; or Lady Mary and the heir have a fight, but then they make up; or Mr. Bates goes to jail, but then he gets out.

Anyway, I think it's like a comfort watch. All the problems get solved, and pretty easily. Rich people are benevolent, poor people live pretty well, the world is clean and well-managed. You know, a fantasy.

Also, the production values are pretty good.

 

Halloween in the Last Century

Here is what Halloween was like when I was four to twelve years old. 

Kids dressed up, usually in costumes they made themselves (a bum, a football player, a dancer), though you could buy masks and cheap rayon costumes at Woolworths or TG&Y. I think one year when I was really little my mother bought us all masks -- I was Casper the Friendly Ghost, as I recall. But kids didn't really like these masks, since they were very hot to wear and also the elastic that held them on hurt your ears.

Anyway, in whatever costume we put together, we went out in packs. Little little kids, like under four, did not go trick or treating. Older than four, you went with a bunch of other kids. By the time I was six or seven, I was going with the kids my age in the neighborhood -- Debbie Moore, Karen Pettus, another girl whose name I don't remember -- and my brothers were going with the kids their age.

There were huge swarms of kids out roaming from house to house, all over the neighborhood. We didn't go outside our particular neighborhood, which was called Willowdale. From about five to about eight, we hit every single house -- there was no such thing as a house that didn't give out candy, though there were houses where "mean" people lived. Down the street, for instance, there was a guy who wouldn't give candy to anyone over six. I mean, really!

We use paper grocery bags to collect the candy, and when we came home, exhausted and triumphant, we poured the heaps of candy out on the living floor and compared our hauls. Occasionally there would be some trading -- like I hated suckers and loved those peanut butter taffy things, so I'd trade with my brother who hated peanut butter.

There weren't any decorations, as I recall, though usually people did make jack-o-lanterns and burned candles in them. And parents had only one function -- they stayed home and gave out candy. No kid would have wanted or needed a parent to walk them from house to house.

In any case, Halloween was one of the important holidays of the year for kids -- Christmas and Mardi Gras being the other two. I still remember the year I got strep throat and missed it. (I did try to go out, but had to turn back a block from the house because I felt so awful. I remember sitting on a curb trying to convince myself I could keep going.)

When my kid was little, we drove to a neighborhood that wasn't full of Evangelicals to trick-or-treat, because of course Evangelical Christians in Arkansas believe halloween is worshipping the devil. I did walk my kid and his friends around the neighborhood, and almost always any kids under about ten had parents walking with them. Kids older than ten still went with their friends. Lots of houses shut their lights off, the accepted signal for 'we don't celebrate halloween here.'

In our recent neighborhood, there was no Halloween. Maybe this was because it was an Evangelical neighborhood? There were a lot of Trump signs.

Here in this new neighborhood, I did see people trick-r-treating. But not only did they all have parents with them, their parents were driving them from house to house. Long trains of cars wound through the streets, stopping every few houses to let the kids out.

Our street is last one in the neighborhood -- surrounded by a green space and a golf course -- and mostly trains of cars didn't make it this far. I only saw a few kids older than ten or so out on their own. They looked lost and confused. I stayed home with the candy, as is my role, but only three different sets of kids came by. This is probably because I didn't put out any decorations, which seems, here, to be the sign for 'we celebrate halloween, come knock on the door.'

I suppose Halloween in the 1960s and 1970s was a bigger (and freer) deal because there were so many more kids back then. Also, the 24/7 news cycle had not yet been invented, and parents didn't know letting your kid run the neighborhood unsupervised was dangerous. 

Next year I'll get some lights and a giant inflatable pumpkin.