Here’s a way to save money on the treats you’ll have to hand out to the witches, ghouls, Spidermen and fairy princesses that come begging at your door this recession-era Halloween:  ask them to perform for you before you give them a treat.  Don’t demand anything requiring stupefying levels of talent; no fiery baton twirling, aria singing or acrobatics should be required.  Just a simple joke, song or story. 

If the little haunts puff up with entitlement and demand their miniature Snickers bars and Airheads, calmly tell them that if a performance requirement was good enough for the children of Scotland and northern England who started this whole “guising” on Halloween thing back in the 19^th century, it should be good enough for them. 

Of course, this leaves you open for the “trick” part of trick-or-treat, which has largely fallen by the graveside in recent years.  When the little guisers of Depression years marched up to their neighbors’ doors and performed for their treats, the treat baskets were often bare, thanks to that generation’s very own banking crisis.  So, the kids got back at the adults with tricks, usually of a fairly harmless nature.

A word of caution:  if your trick-or-treater is over five feet tall and/or is dressed as that ghost-face guy from “Scream”, a particularly gruesome ghoul or any popular serial killer, you might want to exercise caution.  Their tricks might be more than you’d bargained for. 

Here’s a couple of jokes and a poem that your kids could use if asked to perform for their treats:

 What did the skeleton say when he sat down at the table?

                Bon Appetit!

 What did the skeleton order at the coffee bar:

                A large coffee and a mop.

 Black And Gold by Nancy Byrd Turner

Everything is black and gold, Black and gold, to-night: Yellow pumpkins, yellow moon Yellow candlelight;Jet-black cats with golden eyes Shadows black as ink, Firelight blinking in the dark With a yellow blinkBlack and gold, black and gold Nothing in between- When the world turns black and gold Then it’s Halloween!

Charles Darwin - photo from Bettmann Archive

Until this past weekend, I had never heard of an “evolutionist“.

Sure, I realized that many – perhaps most – of my immediate community don’t believe in evolution.  I also realized that creationists’ views are given more deference by Texas schools than I would like.  Beyond that, I had not really considered the creationists’ perceptions.

Then I read the Lubbock paper on Saturday along with my migas and coffee.

Cal Thomas‘ column that day, representing “the right’ was about stem cell research.  While making his argument, he was pretty vehement about this whole “evolutionist” thing, and it was clear that he was probably talking about me.  And it was clear that his perception of me and people like me wasn’t good.

As in next-step-to-Nazism-and-slave-holding not good.  He sniffed: “Appeals to the uniqueness of human life are likely to fall on deaf ears if you are an evolutionist.”

Yeah, us evolutionist sciencey-types are too busy building Frankenstein monsters out of corpses in our basements to care about the uniqueness of human life.  Or maybe we’re off somewhere practicing up on our Nazi skills. No wait – that’s some Rich Iott guy; I’m pretty sure that he’s a Creationist though I couldn’t verify that on the inter-webs.  Anyway, it was clear what Cal Thomas meant in his column.

His logic went something like this:  Embryonic stem cell research uses embryonic cells.  Using embryonic stem cells is bad because each human life is unique.  Scientists came up with the idea to use embryonic stem cells.  Scientists believe in evolution.  Evolution is bad.  Because it came from scientists, not from God.  Therefore, scientists and anyone who believes in embryonic stem cells/ evolution or who is friends with an actual scientist is in danger of either a)starting the next holocaust or b) becoming slave owners.

I’m the daughter of a high school biology teacher who is also a life-long Baptist.  Growing up, my Daddy told me that God was powerful enough to have used evolution as his tool to create the Earth.   That seemed pretty logical to me.  I’ve gone all these years without knowing that  my dad’s logic makes us “theistic evolutionists”.

Using the word “evolutionist” seems to denote, in a sort of code to the hard-core religious right, that a person is a heathen.  They don’t care whether we’re “theistic” or “naturalistic” evolutionists.

On the other hand, I don’t think that most scientists refer to themselves as “evolutionists” at all; in fact, I doubt that most lay people who believe in evolution have ever even heard the term.

The word “evolutionist”  emphasizes the idea that evolution is “just a theory“, which doesn’t go along with the scientific understanding of evolution at all.   Using the term “evolutionist” effectively portrays those who believe in the scientific fact of evolution as members of a religion – a religion that is not mainstream.

Of course, being “not mainstream” in the United States of America these days is not so good.

Evolution is a god-sent gift to those who would wage the culture war, pun intended.  Those of us who believe in evolution take it for granted as common knowledge until some nutjob tries to take the teaching of evolution out of a text book.

Meanwhile, creationists are gaining ground in the United States, with a 2010 poll of the US, Britain and Canada showing that in the US only 35% of people polled accepted evolution as fact compared to over 60% of respondents in the other two countries.  (The US also had an 18% “undecided” group.)

In reality, just as in the right-wing creationist propaganda, the truth of evolution is beginning to be outside the mainstream - unpopular, not the leading opinion.

Scientists believed that the decision to teach evolution was made once and for all back in the 1960′s when we were in a science race with the Russians.  Unfortunately, unless we want our children to be taught that dinosaurs roamed the earth alongside humans, those of us who value reason and science – both the theists and the naturalists among us – are going to have to grasp that this particular battle in the culture war is on again.

Note:  This post also appears on my Open Salon blog.

My city: 263,000 people – median age, 31.6, median income $39k. Evenly divided male/female. A whopping 61% white. Voted 31% for Obama, 68% for McCain. Just to set the stage…so you know where I come from…

That 68% isn’t giving up either. In the lunch room I am forced to consume Faux News with my left-overs; at parties, people shake their heads in disgust about “socialized medicine”. My Facebook friends either pointedly ignore my liberal-leaning link postings or verbally pat me on my little head and send me on my way with words of wisdom from Rush et al.

How people could be so blindly against anything that could be good for them jolts me regularly in everyday life here. During the health care debate, in a poll about Universal Health Care, an acquaintance of mine whose seven children are all on Medicaid voted “no” we shouldn’t have socialized medicine. Yes. Seven.

Speaking of the health care debate, did you find yourself dragged thoroughly off-point while “discussing” health care with more conservative friends? I have. I once spent three hours debating the Canadian health care system. Which makes no sense, given that nothing our cowardly legislators came up with even approaches the universality of the Canadian system.

My husband and I have a child who was born quite early. It made such an impression on me to read about the experiences of parents from around the world on preemie-parent web boards and blogs. Only US parents were worried about losing our homes due to the Herculean bills our progeny were generating. Parents from Canada, among other places, could focus solely on getting their precious little ones healthy enough to get out of the NICU.

I think that might be the point at which the political beliefs I’ve held most of my life, courtesy of my depression-surviving, Franklin Roosevelt – idolizing Mom and Dad, became something more than an abstraction.

Living in the Red state of Texas, forces this type of realization. The hospital where we had our child charges $1.00 for every $.23 of cost. We rank as the absolute worst state in the nation for numbers of people uninsured, period. It’s truly enough to make one blue.

Note:   This post was originally published on my Open Salon blog.