But today’s Halloween is a wee bit different than the Halloween traditions I enjoyed as a child.

This year, I will not open my front door to the usual hobgoblins, ghosts, witches and pirates; my front porch will be visited instead by adults wearing sports jerseys or no costume, who demand candy… or else.

Old versus new

According to Welsh mythology, Halloween marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of the ‘darker half’ of the year, winter. It was seen as a special time, when the spirits or fairies could more easily come into our world and were particularly active. Offerings of food and drink, or portions of the crops, were left for the fairies. Places were set at the dinner table or by the fire to welcome them. After this the eating, drinking, and games were played.

Halloween entitlement society

The last five years, Halloween in my neighborhood has become a freak show. No longer is it about little children donning scary and cute costumes and Trick-or-Treating for candy and goodies.

Buses and vans now drop off loads of children, teens and adults. Some wear costumes, many don’t. Young girls wear wildly inappropriate costumes, often with their parents in tow.

My first memory of Halloween was in the late 1960’s. I dressed in a tacky Blue Fairy costume with a creepy plastic mask. To my chagrin, this costume is now sold on eBay as “vintage.

No longer is the candy request “trick-or-treat;” I open the door to angry faces, intimidating and defensive stances, thrusting open pillow cases at me, while their vans and rented buses idle nearby.

The standard “costume” is greasepaint under the eyes and a NFL jersey… or a plain white T-shirt.

Until last year I used to say, “no costume, no candy.” But that only got my sprinkler heads kicked off, crushed pumpkins, and broken potted plants.

Before calls of racism and elitism are leveled at me, here is an example of the attitude:

“Every Halloween some (mostly) suburban olds start firing off letters to the Editor of the local paper frothing about the *wrong kids* Trick-or-Treating on their lawns. They have a big problem with parents from the *wrong side of town* driving their kids to the neighborhood to get in on the better candy. They hate it for the same reason that Republican voters hate *welfare* and *redistribution*: they’re big racists.”

The blog post is titled “Send us your racist Halloween stories!” and is pure race-baiting.

Speed trick-or-treating

I was raised in a very no-frills, working-class neighborhood in Sacramento. Our parents never drove us to another neighborhood to trick-or-treat.

Granted, the neighborhood was relatively safe. I understand parents want their kids to experience Halloween in a safe neighborhood.

But the thug entitlement mentality is making me turn off the porch lights this year. The demands for mountains of candy by adults and teens is strange. The concept of trick-or-treat has turned into homeowners providing a years’ worth of expensive candy for people they do not know. It’s about volume, and how much candy people can collect from perfect strangers. The celebration is gone.

Absurd Halloween bans

It’s the adults who have ruined the holiday.

The other issue swirling around Halloween now are the recent school bans. Unfortunately, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that schools are banning Halloween activities.

School boards all across the country seem to eventually find ways to ban everything near and dear to many Americans. Starting with a ban on common sense, they’ve also banned traditional American holidays, sports, certain books, art, music, theology and religion. Parents have even been banned from schools.

School administrators have sent home notes this year telling parents superheroes, witches, princesses and goblins are not welcome at school on Halloween this year.

Why are schools banning Halloween activities? Equality – because of cultural, financial and social differences, it’s not fair to celebrate Halloween, according to many school administrators and teachers.

Inglewood Elementary School, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Towamencin, announced its cancellation of of All Hallows Eve festivities, citing concerns that the cultural holiday was “filled with religious overtones,” according to PennLive.com in Pennsylvania.

It is not fair to celebrate anything American, according to this logic. Schools seem to work overtime now preventing kids from experiencing anything new or different… as long as it’s an American tradition.

On Halloween, while it is still light out, I will hand out candy to a few of the littlest ghouls, goblins, witches and pirates who come to my door with their parents. And then I will turn off the porch light, bring all of my pumpkins into the house, and go out to dinner — if I can navigate through the gridlock on my neighborhood streets.

A school district in New York has banned footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls or any dangerous instrument that might hurt someone on school grounds.

“Port Washington schools Superintendent Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries,” CBS New York reported. “Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

So the school officials deferred to the lawyers, who apparently advocate keeping children safely indoors all day where they can’t get hurt. Blunt-nose scissors and jars of edible paste are not going to hurt anyone.

During recess at Port Washington schools, “[F]ootball is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.”

In Sacramento where I live, the Sacramento City Unified School District's motto is: “Putting children first.” On the district website, not one elementary school had pictures of playground equipment or mention of athletic activities.

One school mentioned its “fitness program,” which  included doing “short stretches every morning and one activity per day,”  the school website reported. How very civilized.

The school taught jazzercise, had a healthy snack preparation demonstration, “a visit by Sacramento United Soccer League representatives to teach students about fitness and agility, and a visit by local firefighters who talked to students about the importance of physical and mental fitness.”

Presentations, talks, demonstrations … and jazzercise. How fun. But that's putting teachers first.

Rough and tumble playground

I was a total rough and tumble kid. Soccer wasn’t exciting enough, so my friends and I played tackle soccer. We climbed trees and shot beebee guns at each other. We strapped firecrackers to Barbie dolls, and well, you know.  Today, I’d be arrested and so would my parents.

On the playground at school, we played dodge ball, where you actually were supposed to hit someone with a ball to tag them “out.” Dodge ball is gone. We played crack-the-whip, where kids form a human chain and whip the kid on the end around until she goes careening off and falls. And we did cartwheels. I still have the scars on my always-scabbed knees to remind me what fun recess time was.

We ran races, where someone won and someone lost. Losing is no longer acceptable at government schools. Yet learning how to lose is as important as learning how to win.

And I got in fights but wasn't suspended.

The playground is a place where children establish social order.

The school playground back in the  1950s, 1960s and 1970s was chaos, where kids were allowed to run and play like wild animals. But it was controlled chaos, managed by the social order, and loosely overseen by the adults, who stepped in only when it got too rough.

Football is deadly

There has been a movement for two decades to ban school recess, along with school sports.

Journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell has compared professional football to dog fighting. “In what way is dog fighting any different from football on a certain level, right?” Gladwell said in a Forbes magazine story. “I mean you take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog under the control of another owner, right?”

“'Well, what's football?” Gladwell asked. “We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences. And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they’re participating in some grand American spectacle.”

And now four professional football players are suing the NFL over concussion injuries — as if they didn’t know football was a contact sport, and were paid millions of dollars to do it.

“What does this mean for football in America?” asked Brian E. Moore, MD, on kevinMD.com. “Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field. But, as a parent, you can do something. You can forbid your son from playing football.”

Humans are animals too

To use another dog analogy, the playground is like watching dogs play. Dogs run like a pack, bumping, jumping over each other, play-biting and dominating, or allowing other dogs to dominate. Kids do this too, when allowed. The playground was the place we once learned how to deal with confrontation, hurt, success, physical and emotional challenges, and to face our fears.

With today's emphasis on standardized testing and academic performance, recess and sports have been sacrificed in many schools. In 1998, Benjamin O. Canada, the superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, famously told the New York Times, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.”

A doctor disagrees with this dangerous trend. Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant professor and pediatrician, conducted the “School Recess and Group Classroom Behavior” study in 2009, when the trend to cut recess and sports was growing. “We need to understand that kids need a break,’’ Barros said. “Our brains can concentrate and pay attention for 45 to 60 minutes, and in kids it’s even less. For them to be able to acquire all the academic skills we want them to learn, they need a break to go out and release the energy and play and be social.’’

The playground at school today is calm and organized, where everyone is a winner. And many of the kids are taking Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses. But teachers are happy. And school district lawyers can rest easy.

Let the kids play virtual sports.

By Katy Grimes

After decades of telling women to burn their bras, divorce their husbands, shun motherhood, and pursue careers, feminists have now discovered how wonderful it is to stay at home with the babies.

“A growing number of women are dismissing the career-driven conventions they were raised with, saying no to full-time work; believing instead that every household needs one primary caretaker – the mother,” the Daily Mail UK reported this week.

And they are calling themselves “feminist housewives.”  Titles are very important to some people. I pity their husbands.

New York Magazine recently published a story called “The Retro Wife, feminists who say they’re having it all—by choosing to stay home.”

Who are these self-absorbed women who discover something natural and normal, and must proclaim it from the mountain tops as if they’ve found the secret to eternal youth?

Women who have been brainwashed by radical feminists through decades of federal, state and local level public policy, public and private education, and good old Hollywood — that bastion of reality.

“Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled,” New York Magazine said. “This is the revelation of the moment, hashed and rehashed on blogs and talk shows, a cause of grief for some, fury for others.”

“In her much-discussed Atlanticpiece, Anne-Marie Slaughter, by profession a policy wonk (now at Princeton, formerly at the State Department), calls for better workplace programs: more parental leave, more part-time and flextime options,” New York Magazine swooned.

The Atlantic claimed, “It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. In “Why women still can’t have it all,” Slaughter, whined how while she was in Washington D.C. working her dream job in the State Department, her 14-year old son was having 14-year old issues.

“On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History,” Slaughter said. “I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him.”

I’m shocked. Truly shocked.

“Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me,” Slaughter said.

The biggest problem with feminists is selfishness. The feminist message has always been “me, me, me.” Women were told for decades they didn’t need men, shouldn’t be expected to have children, and deserved to be the Chairwoman of the Board. Remember all of the studies and news about breaking the glass ceiling? Female politicians still obsess about this.

And, even more importantly, the unmistakable message was a women should never let anything or anyone get in the way of the goals she so richly deserved.

But life doesn’t work that way. It’s messy and complicated, and rewarding and full of joy.

1960’s and 1970’s radical feminists

I am a child of the 1960’s, and a teenager of the 1970’s. The feminist message was everywhere — in all forms of media, popular music, school, home, extracurricular school activities, sports, church, Girl Scouts, Hollywood, and adult female family friends. Girls and women could not escape it.

By the time I got into college in 1980, radical feminist professors had finely honed their craft. I was required to take an upper division course outside of my major. I got stuck in a horrid class called “Victimless Crimes,” taught by an openly militant lesbian, who claimed that all sex is rape.

During this time period, churches were even getting into the radical feminist message.

Radical nuns

During the recent papal election of Pope Francis, CBS News appeared to go out of its way to find the only two radical feminists in the crowd of people at the Vatican.

“During CBS’s special coverage of the papal election on Wednesday, correspondent Mark Phillips singled out two dissenters from Catholic tradition in the middle of crowd of hundreds of thousands in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, mere minutes after the white smoke went out of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, and before Pope Francis emerged onto the balcony over the piazza,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“The two activists, who wore pink ‘ordain women’ pins, not only sought to change the Catholic Church’s teachings on the all-male priesthood, but spotlighted “LGBT issues [and] reproductive health care” – a thinly-veiled reference to abortion and contraception – as issues that need to be drastically changed inside the Church,” said the WSJ.

Most of the papal event was covered in the same way by mainstream news organizations.

Last weekend, the Sacramento Bee ran an interview with a radical nun. Sister Simone Campbell is executive director of NETWORK, “a liberal social justice lobby in Washington, D.C.,” the Bee reported. NETWORK was founded 41 years ago in 1972, just before Campbell graduated Mount St. Mary College in Los Angeles in 1973, and U.C. Davis Law School in 1977.

NETWORK is really a a political lobbying group fighting for socially liberal causes. It has nine employees, most of whom are not nuns, according to Catholic media reports.

Campbell has become something of a media darling since she manufactured the media stunt “Nuns on the Bus” tour supporting Obamacare, and opposing Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. Proving the group was just a media stunt, they received far more coverage from mainstream media than was warranted as they appeared in Washington D.C. on a Sunday, when there were no lawmakers working.

Interestingly, the nuns were investigated by the Vatican for their liberal views on abortion, birth control and gay marriage… views which are extremely unorthodox for women who claim to be nuns with the Catholic Church.

Katy Grimes: The gross double standard in media today was exacerbated Monday when far-left, liberal radio talk show host Sirius XM radio host Mike Malloy lost it on air. Malloy said he wished the Lord would lop off the heads of Tea Party members.

“These Tea Bag bastards who by the way, I just wish they would all just go away – or, like in Passover, I just wish there was an angel of the Lord that would pass over – instead of killing the first born in all the households of Egypt just wipe out all the Tea Baggers. Just, you know, the terrible swift sword, just [Mike makes exaggerated “swishing” sounds] – lob their heads off!”

Malloy is so vile, he was fired from Air America radio.

As disgusting as Malloy’s comments were, I have yet to find anyone in the mainstream media calling for discipline or termination. Had Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus or Laura Ingraham said something similar, they’d be off the air within minutes, groveling and apologizing, in order to keep the job.

Radio talk show host Don Imus was fired from CBS radio in 2007 after he called members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”

In March, only a few weeks after Andrew Breitbart’s premature and shocking death, Malloy said that Breitbart should “burn in Hell” and that he was “goddamn glad” he died. There were very few news report, and nothing happened to Malloy.

Recently, on air, Malloy pretended that he was on a phone call with Satan to inquire how Breitbart is doing in Hades.

This is another glaring example of the double standard in the media over what constitutes “civil discourse.”

The bottom line: Liberals can say anything and keep their jobs, and Republicans must maintain “civil discourse,” as determined by the liberal media.

Malloy should be fired, or at least made to grovel for his job.

By Katy Grimes

Too much liberal drivel in today’s newspapers passes for news as well as journalism. Gone is most of the hard news, replaced by front page human-interest stories and social welfare issues.

This prattle is written by pushover cream puffs, who want everyone to feel the pain and agony that comes with being as enlightened as they are.

I didn’t think that Sacramento Bee writer Marcos Breton could write any more twaddle than what prompted my last story about what a tool he was over the failed Kings arena deal. But in Sunday’s Bee, Breton managed to blubber on while simultaneously beating himself up about his past denial of his Hispanic roots.

In a column titled, “Census has shifted, but we’re all one,” Breton wrote, “The U. S. Census Bureaus says I won’t be a minority in California within three years, if not sooner. It also said last week that for the first time in American history, minority births have surpassed white births.”

“I’ve been waiting for this day for years,” Breton said. “I turned my back on the ‘minority’ distinction a long time ago and buried years of negative emotion in the process.”

And then Breton put on the hairshirt of shame and recounted television shows which did not use minority actors for ethnic roles. He spoke of being called a “minority hire,” and of affirmative action policies when he was in college.

Breton attacked Propositions 187 and 209, “which attacked undocumented immigrants and affirmative action, respectively.” Proposition 187, the ban to deny benefits to illegal immigrants, and Prop 209, the ban against preferences based on race, color, sex, ethnicity and national origin, primarily focused on Hispanics and blacks, and ignored the many different Asian cultures and other ethic groups, which also migrated to California.

He failed to note that both initiatives were voted on and passed by the citizens of California for a reason, which had very little to do with racial bias. The votes for measures were driven largely by economics — affirmative action has grossly expanded the public higher education system, and the children and families of illegal immigrants rely heavily on state-funded social services, and healthcare which has also been expanded exponentially.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the number of children in immigrant families has risen nearly 10 times faster than the number in U.S.-born families. They are more likely than those with U.S.-born parents to live in poverty, and are less likely to have health insurance and to receive medical care.

“The Urban Institute finds that the share of children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade that is composed of children of immigrants (including both foreign-born children and U.S.-born children with foreign-born parents) more than tripled from 6 to 20 percent between 1970 and 2000,” the NCSL found. “By 2015, if current immigration levels continue, children of immigrants will constitute 30 percent of the nation’s school population.”

Instead of acknowledging that the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions is unconstitutional, offensive, and even considered morally wrong, Breton also failed to recognize the damage done to all ethnic minorities by assuming they were educationally inferior, and needed to have the standards lowered in order to get into college and gain employment.

Despite the mess affirmative action has made for Hispanics and Blacks, Asians, excluded from Affirmative Action, have continued to excel educationally, and have very low unemployment as a culture.

As a white female who also entered college during affirmative action, I was on the other end, denied access to some schools because my name was too Anglo. Despite my high GPA, I watched as masses of unqualified students filled up state college classes, only to drop out shortly thereafter.

Despite skin color or ethnicity, the students who made it past the first few weeks proved they had what was required, and were disciplined enough to do the work. And that’s all that should matter.

Affirmative action set people of color up to fail, and was often more of a Scarlet Letter than unpreparedness, or the sometimes lack of language skills.

For those many black and Hispanic students who had the grades and qualified on their own for college, they spoke of how offensive it was to be labeled an Affirmative Action student. Success is now their best revenge.

Breton got one thing right when he shared his anger about being called a “minority hire,” but he missed the point. He blamed racism instead of the ridiculous and damaging liberal policies, which try to make everyone the same. And because that’s not possible, liberals tried to level the playing field by promoting race over achievement, skill, talent and hard work.

Regardless of color or background, those who want to play the victim and whine for a living can always find a cause. Others will study hard, work hard, and get ahead through sheer determination… the old-fashioned way.

We are not all one, and I don’t know anyone who thinks that’s a good idea. But in the liberal utopia, no one can stand out, achievements are a threat to others, and excellence must be quashed.