It's Autumn in Ferry Land

What a wonderful time of the year! Here where the water never changes color and the trees stay green (for the most part) we are blessed with a crispness in the air and a tingle to our toes. It is a time of bonfires and apple picking. The end of the month will be a time of ghosts and goblins and freights and delights.
I always fear Halloween a little.. I dread its pranks and mean spiritedness that often comes out in those who want to hurt others. I also feel sadness that Halloween is not what it was when I grew up. My kids had to have their candy x-rayed to prevent finding objects in them. There are no candied apples and homemade donuts and now most of the tricker treaters are done and home by dinner time. There is no going to strangers homes because the milk of kindness might be tainted now. Who knows what lurks behind that mysterious door?
I grew up in a town of 210 people. We knew everyone and if we didn't then someone else we knew did. Mostly everyone was related. We weren't but we were not originally from that town either. At 7:00PM after dinner we were driven to town and we started at the first house on the main street and we trick or treated every single house in town. We had a route all mapped out because there was one house that gave a way warm caramel apples. We hit it half way through the night and we always went to the cooks house last. She had hot apple cider and homemade donuts for us. What a treat that was and usually our parents would be sitting in her kitchen waiting for us to finish and eating their homemade donuts and hot apple cider.
I wont say our time of youth was a time of innocence but surely it was a time when safety on the streets was something taken somewhat forgranted and frights in the night were more a product of our imagination than an actuality.
I have wondered though if part of our "reality" today is not actually the news medias tendency to overdramatize every small incident to create a sense of doom in our lives. I recognize the complete devastation of hurricanes and typhoons and tornadoes and acts of God That is not really what I am talking about though. Maybe it is the news medias failure to recognize that the whole town or area is not devastated with crime. In other words.. Have you ever noticed how the news will cover a murder or some other horrible event from a town on the other side of the United States when they cannot find a sensational story to cover in your own neighborhood? Have you ever noticed that the awful stories are the lead stories in every broadcast but that stories about building good neighborhoods are the last story of the evening? Or on the last page of the paper?
Part of the blame is ours. We tend to read the bad stuff and dwell on it more than on the good stuff. We look for the awful stories and then we feel anger toward the person who did the crime and pity for the person on the receiving end and then we feel thankful that we weren't that person, that family, that neighborhood.....
I had a teacher who once told me that children will do what you expect them to do when it comes to learning. If you teach a child as though he has a handicap then they will grow up with that handicap. I suggest that possibly adults are the same way. Perhaps if the news was just a little more real to our areas... We could establish a relationship to the area we live in. For instance... Tonight in the news... So many people were fed by Operation Sack Lunch and other food vendors in Seattle. After discussion about the organization and how you could help the news would review non profits and community organizations news. It would review the weather, and things that affect your neighborhood and then after making sure that in a town of 500,000 people, 375,000 of them were involved in activities in their own community, helping others and working hard, and 124,450 were traveling, staying home, ill or otherwise involved simply in the day to day existence that life gives some people and that possibly 50 people through out an entire community spreading miles and miles were involved in an illegal activity that directly affected perhaps 50 other people in that community. Put more succinctly wouldn't it be nice instead of looking for bad guys around every corner we started recognizing that most people are not bad guys. They are just like you and I? We want to trust our neighbors, make friends and live contented lives..... Perhaps if we started treating each other as people like ourselves we would change the way our communities have evolved... It is just a suggestion...