Fear Itself

I'm going to take a break from Broke is Beautiful for the moment to revisit the topic of one of my earlier books, The 100 Most Dangerous Things in Everyday Life and What You Can Do About Them, the premise of which is that we worry ourselves over the wrong things.

Lenore Skenazy author of Free Range Kids would like parents to relax about Halloween dangers. She writes in the Huffington Post:

It's not that I'm cavalier about safety. I'm just a sucker -- so to speak -- for the facts. And the fact is: No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it...

It's not just the fact that churches and community centers are throwing parties so that kids don't go out on their own. It's not just the fact that Bobtown, Pennsylvania has gone so far as to "cancel" Halloween altogether -- for the sake of "safety." (The authorities there were surprised to find this decision unpopular.)...

No, the truly spooky thing is that Halloween has become a riot of warnings that are way scarier than the holiday itself...

Our fears are so overblown they'd be laughable if they didn't sound so much like the fears that are haunting us the rest of the year. Fears that have lead to parents to wait with their kids at the school bus stop, and keep them inside on sunny afternoons. Fears that make parents forbid their kids from skipping down the street to invite a friend out to play. That's the everyday version of Halloween fear: The fear that we cannot trust our children amongst our neighbors for one single second because, who knows, they might be pedophiles just waiting to pounce.

If you want to see what childhood is becoming, look how at what Halloween has already become: A parent-planned, climate-controlled, child-coddled, corporate-sponsored "event," where kids are considered too delicate to even survive the sight of a scary costume...

Enjoy some Free Spooky Music from the Free Music Archive

100 Most Dangerous Things

I am in the process of envisioning a slightly different focus for this blog to continue talking about the subjects of all- not just one-- of my books. This will be a challenge with books ranging in topic from Elvis Impersonation to the weather and ballet. Still it is worth a shot.

I came across an article today that could have formed a chapter in The 100 Most Dangerous Things in Every Day Life and What You Can Do About Them, had it not, you know, come out four years after the book did.

The New York Times is reporting on the bane of shoppers existence-- clamshell packaging. You know, the kind of inpenetrable plastic theft prevention prophylactic that you need a pocket knife to open and which occasionally results in the accidental slashing of your fingers.

It has sent about 6,000 Americans each year to emergency rooms with injuries caused by trying to pry, stab and cut open their purchases, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Companies like Amazon and Sony are working on alternatives which may make your holidays brighter this year.

In case you are confronted with a clamshell anyway, WikiHow suggests using a can opener to get inside.