What is Scary?

My neighborhood is filled with ten-foot skeletons and supersized blow-up monsters, even plastic pet skeletons that my dog ignores on our daily walks. These outsize and elaborate constructions may only reflect a retail trend of making Halloween the new Christmas, but I suspect the grownups are finding these times especially scary and their purchases are ballooning as displacement for their fears. Curiously, my area has canceled Halloween celebrations in both schools and the town square because some children may feel frightened or excluded, and merchants are finding the immense crowds that gather scary. There’s a lot of fragility just now.

Here’s what I am finding scary this year:

• The possibility that Trump will become president again despite/because of his indictments.
• Leftist indifference to terrorism against Jews.
• Climate disaster is never on the front burner — of the political agenda, of the news, of our consciousness, of our activism.
• How we all accept agism, poverty and disability as natural and inevitable.
• The death of privacy and the rise of authoritarianism worldwide.
• Well, let’s just say it…Death, period.

What’s on your list today?