By Na’im Madyun, associate dean
What do we do when one artfully captures the pulse of a morning like Maya Angelou, the pulse of a day like Walter Cronkite, or the pulse of a generation like Steve Jobs?
Do we eschew the evening, stay the day, and generate the veneration?
What do we do when that which is artfully captured also captions the pulse of the mourning, the pulse of the night, and the pulse of mis-education?
Once a year, the pulse of the United States is collectively captured by children and adults as we creatively celebrate seeing with blinded eyes and “sugar-coating” our unresolved social conflicts. Cultural novices can quickly become experts on what slows social progression in the United States by treating themselves to the ideas of a night – Halloween – that expresses the cool, the tempting and the cliché.
On this night, a cultural novice will learn the coolness of relating to ISIS as a religious meme, the unavoidable temptation of Ebola, and the clichéd Black male athlete abuser.
On this night, a cultural novice can learn of how these contexts are not only rich for the development of our little kids in K-12 and our bigger kids on college campuses, but also the kids at heart.
There is something special about spending over 2 billion dollars annually on costumes to capture the evolution of a young girl from a fairy to a vixen or a young boy from Flash to fuhrer.
There is something special about a doubling of child pedestrian fatalities with 21% of those fatalities involving drunk drivers.
There is something special about watching your new classmates magically transform into what offends you and then travel back into your discussion group to offer their analysis of the reflective prompt for the day.
Every year, an article is written about how some cultural novices might see this as offensive and inevitably some naive college may try and limit this harmless freedom of cultural expression.
Why even try? Who cares about the window to reference the clichéd research on corporal punishment versus child abuse, the tempting dialogue surrounding sex offenders and trick or treaters or the coolness of displaced Islamaphobia on Muslim identity development?
This observance has long roots and any attempt to disrupt, interrogate or challenge such a tradition would be an unhealthy expression of pride.
We should be proud of this organic, fertile, prairie where we are allowed to exist as nature intended, capturing the beauty of living in a complex, diverse biome. I wonder what we will capture next year.
