Autumn is my favorite time of the year. It’s harvest time, which means lots of food, the trees are brightly colored, the temperature is perfect, the air is dry, and the sky is blue. What’s not to like? Lately, however, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the Halloween decorations.

Halloween was never a big decoration holiday when I was a kid. A few black cats in the windows, a jack o’lantern or two, a witches black hat or broom. Mostly people decorated with harvest-time decorations: a pumpkin, a bale of hay, some corn stalks, a big bunch of mums. Today people are decorating their front lawns with murder scenes. These are elaborate set ups. One person in town has a table set up on their front lawn with a realistic looking human monster butchering human body parts while tortured souls look on. Right up the block from me someone set up a scene with two men lying on the lawn with axes in their chests, a sign strung up on a tree reading HELP! scrawled in something that looks like blood. Other houses have realistic looking cemeteries with something that looks like vomit all over them. Damn, these decorations are ugly. What’s worse, I fear, is the ugliness hiding on the insides of these people’s heads. What was the psychology of people when going to the colosseum to watch men brutally murder one another was an acceptable form of fun? How far are we from that sort of psychology? I want to hope that we are still far from it. I’m worried that the decorations are just the tip of iceberg.

With the economy in the state it’s in, there is a lot to be afraid of going forward, and not just the continuing drop in the stock market. Very few people have any idea what is going on, but when the time comes they WILL react to it, and likely violently. Maybe knowing this is what is making me so sensitive to ugly Halloween decorations. Whatever it is, it worked. I’m petrified.