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.

Pride or groceries?

I had to do something kind of weird today. At least, it made me feel weird. It was an entrepreneurial move, but in a direction I wish things didn’t have to go.

As any regular readers of this blog know, I launched Geniocity.com in June. … right into the maw of a howling, crack-of-doom economy. I guess it takes most start-ups a while to get on track and develop sales, but with people having essentially no money to spend right now on anything but the most basic necessities, Geniocity’s progress has been extra slow. 

For a year now, beginning back in our site-development phase, I’ve been partially supporting this venture through my consulting work as a writer and media specialist. That has worked well enough – but with the company’s cost basis rising along with the prices for everything we need at home, it recently became clear to me that I’m going to have to increase the consulting.

So I’ve been looking for more clients. And I decided that a good place for me to advertise would be the online membership network for Northeast Ohio performing artists that I used for years as a source of news tips when I was a daily-newspaper journalist. People in the local arts community post press releases, job notices and other show-biz-related information there and I figured quite a few of them might need help in putting together written materials, media campaigns and the like. 

But for weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to actually post the message. As a professional critic and reporter, I’ve always had to maintain a little distance from the people I cover, both for reasons relating to conflict of interest and because being the voice of record on a subject gives a writer some community standing, forces him or her to assume a certain authoritative dignity. After publicly investigating the issues and evaluating the work of the arts community for so long, I felt  queasy about asking its members for piecework.

This isn’t about them – artists in general are the most talented, friendly, appreciative, interesting and admirable people I know and many of these specific artists have become valued friends of mine.

What it’s about is me, wondering if I had the practicality and humility not to care that I’m no longer in a position to stay above the arts crowd’s daily struggle for survival – that, in fact, I’ve joined it. And I’ve had to admit to myself that I loathed the idea of any news colleagues or sources discovering that my new business was not an instant financial success.

I loathed it for three days and then I went ahead and posted the notice this morning, because I realized that it’s not shameful to need paying work and it is contemptible to worry that people will judge you for having to get it. I need to earn money to feed my kids and develop my new company and if my taking in washing – or whatever I have to do - allows them all to thrive, then a bruised ego has been no price to pay at all.

I thought parenting, with all those hours of having spit-up on my shirts and not getting to shower on time and running emergency errands with no makeup on, had permanently taught me not to be vain. But being an entrepreneur is showing me all over again, and in unexpected ways, that pride is a luxury I can’t afford.