KELVIN CARTER | STAFF WRITER
“We lose who we are by being who we are not.” ~WOK
Is Halloween considered our escape route to dress up and impersonate someone else or does all the blame fall on the occasion? As we all know Halloween is the day children are known to dress up and travel from home to home, or go to the malls and gather candy for their fulfillment for some days. The question of the day is when is the cut off age of when you can stop celebrating this day until you take your own children. Some children who grow up are raised in a Christian home, as myself, and wait until college time to take advantage of this day to enjoy what was missing. But by age 21 most students forget about the candy and just use this day to dress up. This is precisely how adults celebrate this occasion.
Looking through a popular urban media site, MediaTakeOut.com, many people released pictures of people dressed up for Halloween. Some pictures being funny and others disturbing, which begs the question what is the real reason people dress up for Halloween? There were pictures of a man dressed up as a pregnant Beyoncé from the 2011 VMA’s Awards, a man dressed as Jack Daniels and his son dressed as a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and many more. Not only was the regular public dressing up but fans favorite celebrities also wore different outfits. Chris Brown dressed as an alien in a green spandex suit, Beyoncé as a bumble bee, and Holly Robinson dressed as Lil Wayne.
However there was one costume that has struck a nerve in the black community. Hockey player Raffi Torres painted his body black and dressed as Jay-Z. Another person dressed as a runaway slave with a nametag that says Toby. If you were to ask a regular female citizen what she would be for Halloween, she may say, “a fireman but sexy it up” (sexy is not a verb). Is this day used only for people to do something they know peers and family would normally not approve of? Is this the day when woman and men too, pull out lingerie, and wear it freely and blame it on the occasion of Halloween? Looking at the pictures that flood the internet normally the day or two after Halloween proves that people are becoming more bold and careless.
When attending a gathering this past weekend, I was asked what I would dress up as for Halloween. I expressed to her, “I’m dressing as myself.” I’ve realized that this is just a day when people dress as someone who’s live they may want. We must realize that you should not try to dress as someone you wish to become, but as what you will become. Children are given the opportunity to wear costumes in order to express their dreams when they get older. For example, a young girl may dress as a princess when she is young and dreams to be treated as royalty by her husband in the future. But as an adult we now have plenty of opportunity to acquire our goals and dreams. Yet, there are adults who still dream, who still dress up as inappropriate characters because… well many reasons we still have no explanation. Just blame it on Halloween.
