The Scariest Halloween of Our Lives
Halloween has finally lived up to its name as scary. The mainly unvaccinated children, all up to age 12, are going without Covid level masks from door to door, to be met by adults as close as your arm can reach into their pumpkins. My fear of Halloween used to only be the fear of candy lying around full of sugar, which I would finish off. This was due to the uncertainty of how much to buy, since you didn’t want to run out. This is even more ironic now, since obesity and diabetes are comorbidities for severe Covid infections.
Compared to nobody last year, a good 60% of Californians and 68% of Orange County residents are fully vaccinated, but the Delta Variant is maybe twice as transmissible as the original virus, due to it’s making a much larger viral load and being distributed by aerosol.
Due to care in Australia in their winter, we did not have assured guidance of what variants of the flu strains to produce in the flu vaccines this year, so even this year’s flu vaccine is questionable — scary. About 100 million flu vaccine doses have been distributed, but that may not yet be the same as injected.
Did I forget to mention that I live in historically Republican conservative Orange County, California? By some miracle, the 2018 midterm led to the Irvine Congressional district and the coastal district turning Democratic, for the first time in my 48 years here. In 2020, the coastal district returned Republican, much to our chagrin, but Irvine survived Democratic. The new coastal Republican has on her Energy and Environment page, not a picture of our beautiful beaches, or boat filled harbors, or beach park views, but a picture of an off-shore oil well. That would not have drawn my attention, except that we have just had a scary oil spill from the pipe line leading from our off-shore oil wells, which has traveled all the way South from Huntington Beach to San Diego.
While our neighbor LA County is requiring that students age 12 and up be vaccinated, and masking up in schools, Orange County has elected conservatives who will not take that step. The only thing I have to celebrate here is that California has done so much better than the other large states of Texas and Florida, who’s Governors have gone rouge in barring mandates.
I can’t imagine what purpose Halloween filled or threats it raised epidemiologically in the past. It was called all-hallows’-eve, hallows being saints, and for remembering the dead. What psychological roll did the holiday play for children, and what does it do today during a pandemic. Was it to warn children and others to avoid dead people, as their corpses could be infectious? Was it to give kids some confidence that they could be scary, since otherwise adults clearly could boss them around? Was it because before vaccines, many children died from childhood diseases, and to remind them to be cautious? This reminds me that for several years before the pandemic, some parents became misinformed, including well educated suburbanites, and were opposing childhood vaccinations against deadly childhood diseases. Even if the children had a childhood disease, the adults would have been immune by having survived them when they were kids. Now the tables are turned.
I stopped watching scary movies a long time ago, not because they scared me while watching them, but because I was afraid of lingering nightmares. My readers know that sci-fi movies make a deep impression on me and lead to questions of what is unphysical about them. Also, my porch light went out to weeks ago, and I don’t know if the association is going to replace it before Halloween. As the college and high school students approach, I usually play in organ mode on my keyboard the creepy piece from the movie “Man of a Thousand Faces” about Lon Chaney, the initial Phantom of the Opera, which I ushered on Hollywood Boulevard when I was in high school. The piece is Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
Politically, we still live in very scary times, as I elaborated in the previous article, and we all hear about every day and with every Trump rally or investigation, not to mention the unfathomable Sinema psyche.
Halloween is just the first of a scary quadrifecta of holiday celebrations, with booked holiday air travel exceeding that of normal years. We have family gatherings at Thanksgiving, a month later. Then there is Christmas and Christmas shopping, another month later. And finally New Years and associated College Bowl games. We could also add NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl, yet another month later. Celebrations to keep winter interesting, as we are all cooped up indoors, with no flow through ventilation.
