
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 30, 1993                   TAG: 9312300030
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HALLOWEEN

OK. All you people out there who have festooned your houses and trees with cardboard skeletons, or dressed your children in ghost costumes, report to your nearest mortuary for sensitivity training.

It isn't nice to show so little respect for the dead. Excuse us, the terminally inconvenienced.

If you insist on decorating your yards and children for Halloween, better stick to pumpkins and jack-o'-lanterns. Providing, it should go without saying, that they are not so rotund as to offend obese people - er, that is, the horizonally challenged - or so snaggle-toothed as to insult the dentally different.

The devil, you say?

Don't even think about it - lest you conjure up unpleasant thoughts and negative feelings for others.

For now, the politically correct movement has come to this:

School officials in Iowa City, Iowa, have nixed several children's Halloween costumes as too mindful of unpleasantness. Devils and witches are out. So are hobos and gypsies. So are Indians, Africans, disabled persons and elderly persons.

Does this mean Indians, Africans, disabled or elderly persons shouldn't go trick-or-treating, or open their doors to trick-or-treaters, to avoid reminding anyone of what the Iowans called "hurtful situations"? Darned if we know.

Darned if we can figure out either how they settled on some costumes as completely inoffensive.

Abe Lincoln, for instance, may hurt feminists' feelings because he alleged that "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

For that matter, Abe was a Republican, which is a negative as far as Democrats are concerned. (Republicans may prove particularly hurtful to some Democrats' sensitivities in a couple of days.)

Some of us are offended by "friendly monsters" such as the ubiquitous and obnoxious Barney, who appears to have Iowa's imprimatur.

If 100 kids dressed up as purple dinosaurs come to our door, it may be a hurtful situation that could give us an ulcer. Better that witches and devils get our gourd - a politically correct pumpkin gourd, of course.

At least vegetables, as voiceless victims of speciesism, have no ability to protest the offenses we subject them to.

Come to think of it, we are offended by the notion that the sensitivity police must now be out patrolling neighborhoods on Halloween, or whatever day local officials have declared as Halloween. It's stupid. Or, at least, cerebrally challenged.

by CNB