Time to end Halloween.

Really this is the last straw. No, not Michelle Obama saying "Kids Will One Day Trick-or-Treat for Vegetables."

This lady, thinking she's got "the spirit of Halloween":

The woman who answered the door was wearing an apron covered in blood and had a mask covering her mouth and was waving a fake knife. She had a table out and on it were things like hearts and intestines and mince....

The woman reportedly grabbed one of the girl’s hands and gave her one of the hearts, and the children thought it was a fake heart. After placing the lamb’s heart – which was wrapped in a plastic bag – into the children’s hands, the woman picked up a fake knife and chased after the group.

Now, seriously, why isn't that the spirit of Halloween? How are people supposed to know how to do a night of transgressiveness that's scary and creepy, but just the right way?

I never want to read another story about a little kid that went as a KKK guy, when it's just completely normal to go as Satan. He didn't get on the right wavelength of EVIL. You can be Attila the Hun but not Hitler. You're supposed to understand that. When you are 7.

Come on, time to quit altogether. Why are we handing out candy? Why are we answering the door at night to strangers? Why are we sending kids around to the houses of strangers? Why are we publicizing children's costumes mistakes? It no longer makes any sense as anything other than a party time for adults. End Halloween.

The Oberlin incident.

"Oberlin Cancels Classes After Figure in KKK Robes Spotted Near African Heritage House" — so read the headlines yesterday. The article referred also to "a string of hate-related incidents at Oberlin," such as graffiti on Black History Month posters crossing out the word "Black" and scrawling in the N-word.

But who's the culprit and what's the real motive? I avoided blogging this story when I saw it yesterday because I expected an update, and here it is:

According to a person with access to the faculty mailing list, faculty members had been told—"unofficially," (i.e., not through official channels)—that "the investigation into this incident was dropped when it was discovered that the person responsible was someone within the MRC [the Multicultural Resource Center], who would be disciplined internally"; according to conversations with other members of the Oberlin community, this appears to be a widespread, and widely-believed, rumor. (The same source, who asked to remain anonymous, claims that the MRC, whose former director, Eric Estes, is now the Dean of Students, has been criticized for the amount of student college money it receives, and that its leadership has "had trouble justifying how many campus coordinators they have on staff.")

When you don't know who has said/written/done something, don't take the expression at face value. Where the identity of the speaker/writer/actor is hidden, think about who has a motive, who has an interest.

How many class hours were taken from tuition-paying students (who also pay the fees that support, perhaps lavishly, things like the Multicultural Resource Center)? Impulsive, biased assumptions are made by the authorities and normal lesson plans give way to a teach-in about a problem that may not even be the problem. A university should model intelligence and reason.

Will we ever learn the real story? Do the students even care?

Black man in a KKK outfit on a street corner in Philadelphia...

... holds a sign saying that black-on-black murder today exceeds — every 6 months — the total number of murders the KKK inflicted on black people over a period of 86 years. 

The man, Sixx King, is a filmmaker. A lot of people are angry at him.