The State of the Nation: a post-Hallowe’en report

Our county has long had a “Choose Civility” campaign -- green bumper-stickers on hybrids and Volvos  as far as the eye can see.  It always struck me as lame:  anyone who would be influenced by such a genteel appeal  would already be civil to begin with;  nor can one easily picture the citizen, chin on fist and finger to lips, thinking: “Hmm … Civility … Barbarism … Civility … Barbarism … Hmm …….”

[For analysis of a similar such pitch, this one offering a choice between Civilization and Savagery, click here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/enthymeme-alert.html ]

However, it may have had an effect.  This Hallowe’en was the most … civil in years.

We always offer a choice of several substantial candies, but each child is siupposed to take just one.   And this year, everyone, even the teenagers, hewed to this rule.  Indeed the teens, this time, often added things like “Thank you, sir” and “Happy Hallowe’en".  (Really, I could die tonight, the nation’s future is in good hands.)

There was just one semi-exception -- and that, of the rule-proving kind. ...

A tiny boy, who had just that day turned two, borne about in his father’s arms, was experiencing his very first Hallowe’en.  He was quite excited.  I handed him a candy-bar, at which his face lit up;  and his father put it in a little bag.  But the boy, straining against restraint, his eyes as big as saucers, cantilevered forward, both chubby arms with flapping fingers  outstretched towards the brimming bowl, with its unimaginable wealth of colorful candies.  “Now now, just one,” I gently admonished;  and his father echoed this admonition.

So, what have we here:  a little greedy-guts?  Perhaps -- but this is greed -- if greed it be -- absolutely pure and unalloyed, with no invidious admixture, along the lines of “I want more than Bobby gets”  or “Having all these goodies makes me King of the Mountain.   No, it is rather that original archaic nisus that propels all creatures to avail themselves of such plenty as they might stumble upon, in a world punctuated by times of want.  Reese’s Pieces had been few and far between during the last glaciation;  and our little cavebaby or troglo-tot  understandably wished to take on provisions while they were to be had.  Nor, in such a frame of mind, would such pernickity precision arithmetic as “Just one” have any cognitive meaning, let alone moral force:  surely the tyke had already quite forgotten the piece his father had stashed in the bag.   As soon bid the bunny shun the carrot, or the babe  the breast.

We are not born civil, nor civilized, but must be patiently, persistently socialized, first by our mother and father, and later by society at large.   My bet is that this tot is well on track, to himself be making the rounds, a generation from now, with his own squirming offspring in tow -- possibly on airborne scooters, or on Mars, who knows that the future may have in store;  but some things don’t change: 

“Just one, little fellow;  just one.”

[Footnote, which it pains me to report:  Not everywhere is the picture so rosy.

Just in the next county over, as a friend tells it, the children who came to her door were mostly well-behaved, but in a couple of cases  the mom reached over and grabbed a fistful, sinking her arm in  up to the wrist.

-- Well, but then their county didn’t have a “Choose Civility” campaign.]