The nightmare before Halloween

I’m writing this on what we who grew up in Northern New Jersey always called Mischief Night – the evening before Halloween, when the juvenile delinquents and probably a few dubious adults would rampage through neighborhoods with toilet paper, eggs and salt, often doing real damage to people’s property.

No one with any sense went out on Mischief Night – or let their cars or lawn furniture stay out, either.  

By the time we were all costumed for trick-or-treating on Halloween, most of the parents had already spent long daylight hours seething and swearing – scrubbing dried yolk off the siding, digging up patches of salt-burned grass and reporting the occasional blown-up mailbox to the police. When it grew dark, they took giggling, shrieking packs of us from door to door, holding our hands, guiding us with flashlights and making sure no one’s bag developed a tragic, candy-leaking hole. Halloween was fun-scary, safe.

But the grown-ups couldn’t shield us from Mischief Night. We absorbed their worry - a frightening sense of unpredicability and lawlessness was in the air. Vandals were about. Our homes felt threatened. We knew there’d be trouble somewhere, maybe for us.

It’s been Mischief Night in America for a long time now. There’s egg to clean off our faces from having allowed the Bush Administration and its favored high-rollers to dismantle the safeguards and flout the processes protecting all of us from financial, environmental and military-industrial rapine. Salt’s been plowed into the ground, killing or stunting everything we need to keep healthy, from our incomes and climate to our international alliances.  

Though their spree is ending, they set off a last big cherry bomb for us in the milk box. Take a look:  It’s a lot more terrifying than a ghost. And we who are the grown-ups now – the thinkers, the doers, the earners and the voters – must respond to it by being entrepreneurial about more than our businesses and careers. We have to be entrepreneurial about our nation and the world.

Why? Because we have to do better than simply pull down the toilet paper and repair the damage. We have to make sure the delinquents never get another chance to damage things in the first place. So it’s going to be up to those of us with imagination and enterprise – and aren’t you one? - to invent new policies and strategies, new and better ways of creating wealth that encourage people to do their best, rather than their worst, and reward them when they do. 

It’s like the difference between clear-cutting old-growth forest and sustainably farming trees. Or between selling people risky mortgages and investing in neighborhood revitalization.

Too many people want to get rich doing what’s cheap, fast, easy or sexy, no matter how disastrous the consequences. We have to help people understand that there’s just as much money to be made from creative services and products that save our dying environment and build happy, flourishing lives, families and communities.

We have to make this the last Mischief Night we’ll ever need to call by that name.