Make Halloween Dangerous Again!

Halloween is quite easily my favorite holiday. A heathen celebration the Christians failed to conquer, it's a time of joyful chaos and youth rebellion decorated by skeletons, scattered leaves, flickering jack-o-lanterns, and bonfire smoke. A holiday where serial killers are lionized and everyone dresses in drag, betraying conformity to expose their darkest desires to be whores and outlaws. It's the one time of year when a genderfuck malcontent like me can feel halfway normal without having to sell out. It's also arguably this stupid countries only truly anarchist holiday, or at least it was and it still should be.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Halloween meant one night a year when kids owned the streets, wandering unsupervised from house to house dressed in disguise like demons and monsters, appropriating candy from random strangers under the threat of vandalism like tiny unions of egoists. Trick or Treat began as a threat. You could hand over the good stuff (and it better be good) or you could get your house fucked up in a toilet paper draped act of propaganda of the deed, letting the whole neighborhood and any other passing horde of hoodlums know who fucked up and why. In certain parts of the country there was a completely separate holiday called Hell Night, when children engaged in mass acts of gleeful sabotage against the parents, teachers, clergy, and cops who made them feel powerless during the rest of the year. Windows were broken, tires were slashed, and a sense of justice was returned to the universe.

Halloween and Hell Night weren't like Christmas or Easter. The only gifts you got where the gifts you took, the gifts you earned. It was an empowering event that celebrated lawlessness and the collective power of us against them. So it should come as little surprise that the thems of this world have conspired to neuter this heathen celebration of unfettered youth power, by badge, bible, or checkbook. Over the last couple decades Halloween has been transformed into something truly monstrous, the worst kind of monster, a fascistically vanilla monster called "normal". A pejorative so hideously fowl that it could have only been created by an adult, dead from the heart up.

Clever costumes constructed from Goodwill dumpster dives and pilfered drug store make-up have been Disneyfied and replaced by cheap mass produced commercials for corny Hollywood schlock. Feral gangs of sugar-high seeking adolescent illegalists have been rangled into domesticated doorbell chain gangs governed by cartels of uptight helicopter parents. The best junk food has been banished for being unwrapped or unhealthy and replaced by flavorless healthy alternatives to a good time. The moonlit blacktop playgrounds of nocturnal suburbia have become infested by curfew crunching cops and drowned in floodlights seeking to keep kids under adult thumbs even on the only night of the year that was once there's for the taking.

Well I say enough. This is a call to the kids of this country, both young and old, to revolt. Take back the streets. Take back Halloween from the beige forces of adulthood. It was never there's to take to begin with. So break the rules. Sneak out without your parents supervision. Dress to terrify and offend your marks. Get sick on lethal amounts chocolate. Punish the dicks who hand out raisins with shaving cream and rotten eggs. Egg a fucking cop car while your at it. Blow up your neighbors mailbox. Toilet paper your vice principles house and soak the mess with his hose so he cant clean it up. Smash a jack-o-lantern. Get ripped on forties lifted from the local mini-mart. Get finger fucked by your best friend in your grandmas stolen Gremlin. Be a fucking kid. Break the rules. Fuck up. Do something random and stupid. Suburbia's a goddamn prison so start a fucking riot.

And to all the adults in the room, especially the parents, give your kids a fucking break for a change. They may be your responsibility but they're not your property. Turn a blind eye. Hand out the good candy and take it on the fucking chin when your car gets shit-canned if you fail to deliver. You were kids once. Anarchist or not, you can remember what it was like to be the powerless prisoner of your parents or the state. I'm an agoraphobic basket-case. I've grown scared as I've grown old, but I take comfort in the idea that there are still little Stirnerites out there to stir the shit and make the man sweat. They'll here me shout "Right on!" from my living room window with a raised fist after taking a bat to my mailbox. Embrace the chaos, even if that means just not snitching. Keep the anarchist spirit of this season alive. Make Halloween dangerous again.

Happy Samhain, dearest motherfuckers. Keep it wicked and give em holy hell. Somebodies got to.



Peace, Love, & Anarchy- CH



Soundtrack; songs to raise hell to

* Double Dare by Bauhaus
* Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by the White Stripes
* 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
* TV Set by the Cramps
* Suburbia by Arcade Fire
* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks
* The House that Heaven Built by Japandroids
* (Every Day Is) Halloween by Ministry
* Awful by Hole
* Rise Above by Black Flag