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Don’t you get sick of those damned poor trick-or-treaters in your rich neighborhood?

Caperton

This week, an actual win from advice columnist Dear Prudence:

Dear Prudence,

I live in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, but on one of the more “modest” streets — mostly doctors and lawyers and family business owners. (A few blocks away are billionaires, families with famous last names, media moguls, etc.) I have noticed that on Halloween, what seems like 75 percent of the trick-or-treaters are clearly not from this neighborhood. Kids arrive in overflowing cars from less fortunate areas. I feel this is inappropriate. Halloween isn’t a social service or a charity in which I have to buy candy for less fortunate children. Obviously this makes me feel like a terrible person, because what’s the big deal about making less fortunate kids happy on a holiday? But it just bugs me, because we already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services. Should Halloween be a neighborhood activity, or is it legitimately a free-for-all in which people hunt down the best candy grounds for their kids?

— Halloween for the 99 Percent

I KNOW, RIGHT? You work so hard to live in a million-dollar neighborhood and pass out Halloween candy to the kids of billionaires and media moguls. And then poor kids invade by the minivan-load in costumes that are clearly not from this neighborhood, so you’re stuck handing out charity candy when you already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services. Is there no trick-or-treating in prisons and poorhouses?

Obviously, this makes me feel like a terrible person[.]

It should.

Prudence agrees with me.

Dear 99,

In the urban neighborhood where I used to live, families who were not from the immediate area would come in fairly large groups to trick-or-treat on our streets, which were safe, well-lit, and full of people overstocked with candy. It was delightful to see the little mermaids, spider-men, ghosts, and the occasional axe murderer excitedly run up and down our front steps, having the time of their lives. So we’d spend an extra $20 to make sure we had enough candy for kids who weren’t as fortunate as ours. There you are, 99, on the impoverished side of Greenwich or Beverly Hills, with the other struggling lawyers, doctors, and business owners. Your whine makes me kind of wish that people from the actual poor side of town come this year not with scary costumes but with real pitchforks. Stop being callous and miserly and go to Costco, you cheapskate, and get enough candy to fill the bags of the kids who come one day a year to marvel at how the 1 percent live.

— Prudie

17 thoughts on Don’t you get sick of those damned poor trick-or-treaters in your rich neighborhood?

  1. I’m trying to decide if the letter-writer was a real person writing about a real “problem,” or if this was a parody. Because nobody could be that terrible a person, right?

    1. I’ve seen this attitude expressed sincerely at work, but can’t imagine someone seriously writing to an advice columnist for this. What would they think the advice columnist would do?

    2. I can believe it. It’s now considered pretty normal, even among working class & regular middle class people, not just upper middle class, to morally judge the poorer – even poor children.

      Indeed, I’ve heard this type of stuff from people who they themselves are poor. I’ve noticed that people living off some kind of government benefits are sometimes the quickest to judge other people living off some kind of government benefits.
      The demonizing has been so complete, that even welfare recipients assume that the demonized they hear about in the news are “those other people” who are just lazy are ripping off the system – not them! They don’t even know the people those people are demonizing ARE THEM!
      When I came into contact with people like that, who said the things they did, getting the services & public money they do… it was a sickening swirl of a revelation for me and I still have trouble wrapping my head around it – but it’s absolutely true. They have been so snowed that they don’t even know they have already been come for! (ie: “when they came for the X, I didn’t…”)

      I’ve also heard that some people think that poor people are a nuisance to public parks! Because, after all, they’re just looking for hand-outs! ????
      It occurred to me the irony of that… That only rich people ought to be going to public parks for free???

      It’s an even bigger irony with Halloween… since that’s not just using a public space – It’s supposed to be an entirely publicly acceptable way of looking for “hand-outs”… up & down the economic ladder.
      Even rich kids go trick-or-treating!

      Take it one step further, it’s part of the larger picture where billionaires & their families can NOT WORK AT ALL, and live off investment income (some of which could’ve gone toward better wages for the lowest paid so they wouldn’t need govt benefits)… And that’s considered morally OKAY for those people not to lift a finger or work for a living. But poor people are immoral if they’re not working – even if it’s because they’re disabled or just can’t find someone to hire them, because that’s their own failing fault.

      In this context of public opinions at large in the wider big picture of our culture, I completely believe it’s entirely possible this letter really was written to an advice column, and that the author of the letter probably even assumed that the advice columnist would be agreeable about this “problem”.

  2. That person is horrible. My family always trick or treated at our grandmother’s because the area around our home wasn’t the safest. It was quite common to see other families do the same thing.

    She should really learn to appreciate having a safe environment to offer her kids.

    1. I think that’s what’s so galling about this story though.
      The fact that she didn’t see that as an option betrays that she fears that if she didn’t participate in Halloween, she might offend her billionaire neighbors’ children.
      So she sees herself between a rock & a hard place that is entirely made up in her mind because of her worldview of social climbing.
      She’s mad that she’s not wealthy enough to give away candy so freely as her “betters”, but instead of questioning that situation, she blames the poor for expecting more of herself.

  4. Everyone knows that Halloween is really just a socialist machination. Little does the Vulnerable Rich know that every house in America hands out ‘Das Kapital for Kids’ copies to trick-or-treaters. Why, children are even encouraged to demand that they receive ‘something good to eat!’

    Libertarians can go all kinds of places with this shit.

  5. I love Halloween but I hate trick or treaters. They mean my dogs are going to be barking half the night and I’m stuck at home keeping them from stress eating my house. I tried leaving a big bowl out, but assy teens steal the candy before the little kids can get any. I even sat at the end of the sidewalk one year, but people kept coming until 11 pm and ringing the bell after I had gone inside. It never even occurred to me to question what neighborhood they’re coming from, but Im not a snotty rich person so why would it?

    1. Yes, what bothered me back when I lived in a place where trick-or-treaters came to the door was not where they came from but how old they were: I wanted to give out candy to little kids, not to people in their late teens who were considerably bigger than I was, and took way more than their fair share. After a certain time, like 8 pm, we just stopped answering the doorbell.

      1. I always managed to be sick on Halloween so I never got to trick or treat aside from being driven 6 blocks to my grandparents house and straight back home. But by the time I was 12, trick or treating was replaced with boy girl halloween parties, topped off with a hayride through the cemetery. One of the fancy pants rich parents threw one every Halloween for their daughter, and since it was a small town all the kids her age ( we were all friends…there was no one else around lol ) went to Jessicas party. My teen self would have found it degrading to go trick or treating. That was for babies.

      2. Nooooo! I was that kid who loved trick or treating well into her middle school years. But then adults shunned me! Shunned me and my costumes, I say!

        You, Madame, are a horrible dream killer.

  6. Jeez, what are those kids and their families thinking, that they have a right to a celebratory good time in a safe neighborhood with lots of candy, just like rich kids? Why don’t they know their place?

    1. Of course, when I was growing up I trick-or-treated only within my own apartment building. I had never even heard of going around to other buildings or houses.

    2. Where I grew up the city and suburbs had specific daytime hours on the weekends in which we could trick or treat. Only if Halloween actually fell on the weekend would we be allowed to actually trick or treat on Halloween, and we had only a few hours in which we could do it. (I did have a friend who lived in the city next to mine, with different hours, so we would often trick or treat together, to double our time.)

      It was really surprising to me to see, as an adult, children trick or treating at night on Halloween when I moved to Chicago.

  7. Address, please. I’ll donate for the toilet paper in the trees, tater in the Mercedes muffler, sardines for the Beemer’s AC vents, and rotteneggs for all of those shiny windows.

  8. There’s also children who live in rural areas. My nearest neighbors growing up were a mile either way. It was a lot easier to walk from house to house in my uncle’s nice suburb than it would have been fore me to stay in my own “neighborhood.”

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