Bartleby

I see a lot of commentary about "what happened to Halloween?" and so I'll explain: the middle class is dead and so all of our traditions shifted from middle to upper-middle class. Where are the kids? They used to walk their own neighborhoods and come home with a mild haul of 50 pieces of candy, that they'd cherish for the next two or three weeks. Now, the middle class kids all vacate their own neighborhoods and swarm the upper-middle class ones, where they come home with candy measured in pounds, far more than they could or should ever eat. I've lived, over the past twenty years, in a range of neighborhoods, some rich, upper-middle, and even middle. The middle-class ones were the saddest; some years I saw zero kids. The upper-middle and rich neighborhoods, on the other hand, sometimes saw thousands. The middle class neighborhoods no longer have 50 houses with families in them. They might have 10 or 20. There just aren't enough families to sustain the localized tradition. It's depressing. Everyone wants to go where the energy is, and that's the upper-middle class or rich neighborhoods. The middle-class is dead, and all of the life, energy, and vigor has disappeared with them. That's what immigrants are supposed to replace: the life of the Americans who never were.