the day of all souls is a mere day away, and why not celebrate it with a quote from the finest Halloween song of all time 'Minds Playing Tricks on Me' by the Geto Boys. you might recall i was in the woods last week for Forever Wild's annual Spook-O-Ree and i had mentioned the supposed furor over the trip's namesake, years earlier while my patrol mates and i were young tykes in the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts are run much like any other national operation, by smaller groups in this case called councils, and even smaller districts. The Greater New York Council was in charge of New York City and the outlying suburbs. With some concern over the word 'spook' and how it would play with a growing number of black scouts and their families, the district and ultimately the Greater New York Council found, in their infinite wisdom, and to head a controversy off at the pass, changed the name to the Trek-O-Ree...
to repeat some history, the Spook-O-Ree was staged the last weekend in October. My Boy Scout troop took charge of what we called "the Horror Trail," a night hike through which other Troops would wade through a haunted campsite sort of set up that we as a Troop would put together from the ground up. When the outing's name was changed from Spook to Trek, the entire weekend's format was changed. Gone was the "Horror Trail" and in was a day hike, up to five miles if i remember, with full packs. How that represented Halloween i'll never know? But what troubles me now is why it the term "spook" could be misinterpreted to mean "black", or "african-american" or "nigger." It was my first experience in the ideology of political correctness, then still in its infancy. Political correctness killed Halloween...
now, maybe its because i'm not from the south. Or maybe its that i grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood and was brought up by parents who kept their hatred to themselves and let me figure out my own. But it seems to me the word "spook" would refer a ghost or spectre. Casper or one the villains from Scooby Doo who was foiled by those meddling kids. A white sheet—the KKK even, now there's something. Shouldn't white people be offended by the word "spook", like white people are ghosts or worse affiliated with the KKK? The reality is different, i know, but the point is valid. A decision shrouded by a politically correct dogma took away a piece of my youth. A harmless horror trail...
last time i checked, sticks and stones were still capable of bruising, scarring and the breaking of bones, but to this day, words have yet to send anyone to a hospital...
while attending St John's i was sad witness to the retiring of the name "redmen." The name was given to the football team in the 1920's because they wore red uniforms. The bone of contention in the '90's was the university's use of an Native-American mascot. While it could be argued that use of such a mascot could be insensitive the aborigines of this hemisphere, the name could not be questioned. Yet it was, so the mascot and team name were both changed to represent a weather pattern. Somewhere the clouds are in an uproar...
so we return to a recurring theme, that of the ego. We, as a society, would rather lie, mislead and misrepresent our sentiment, than be honest. We'd rather save feelings than tell the truth. How can anyone be trusted when this veil of ignorance shrouds our words? Further, is the world a better place because of this behavior?...
political correctness is nothing more than an instrument to hide the truth. That is assuming that truth isn't something we've created to keep us from lying in the first place. Halloween for instance. This jolly holiday of ghouls and ghosts, where children threaten homeowners with vandalism in exchange for candy is actually a pagan holiday. Such and important holiday in fact that the Catholic church has created it's own holiday to wash away the supposed heresy of it in All Saints Day. A day to honor the saints. Like making them saints wasn't enough to honor their memory...
shouldn't we want to be honest? Sure, there is plenty of hate out there. Enough to choke us. But isn't hiding the hate making it worse? How can we possibly further ourselves as society by not tackling the actual issues that are bothering us? Shouldn't we be wondering why the powers that be would rather we fuss and fight over words?...
words...
i don't propose we start hurling slurs out behind the guise of getting to the truth. i do propose we ask ourselves why we don't question the origin of these slurs and why they hurt in such a way that we needed to create a new jargon to protect ourselves from them...
i propose the word 'spook' return to its rightful place, Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash" and GZA's "Swordsman"...
spook—dutch/middle-english for ghost...
changing the world one word at a time...
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