How to be really scared this Halloween

As we get older, it gets harder to enjoy Halloween. Neighbors who were delighted to drop treats into your bag when you showed up, at age 8, dressed as Batman, have a very different reaction when you show up in a black mask, at age 38, demanding candy and threatening some unspecified “trick” if the goods aren’t delivered. And it’s more difficult for adults to be genuinely scared by ghosts and ghouls and gourds carved with frightening faces. The real fear strikes when you realize your homeowner’s policy doesn’t cover fires started by candles placed in pumpkins on the front porch.

Although grown-ups have to exert more effort to get into the spirit of the holiday, it helps that this Halloween falls within a truly terrifying political campaign season. If you really want to be afraid, consider the following:

Six more years in the U.S. Senate for Susan Collins. Collins’ tenure in the Senate has been marked by more murder, torture and secret dungeons than the “Saw” franchise. Granted, she’s not personally wielding the cat o’ nine tails. But Collins’ support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enabled our spies, allies and paid mercenaries to commit all manner of atrocities. And as a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Collins had a front-row seat to the CIA’s human-rights abuses, but rather than expose or protest the agency’s misdeeds, she was apparently content to munch popcorn and keep watching.

The really scary part: Despite Sen. Collins’ monumental foreign-policy misjudgments, she’s so popular in Maine that her re-election is all but assured. Meanwhile, the bloody mess in the Middle East caused by the foolish policies Collins supports is drawing us back into the region. There’ll be many more dangerous decisions to make regarding our conduct in these conflicts over the next six years, and the same hawkish senator who helped create this fiasco will be casting votes in Maine’s name again, quite possibly with her party in control of the Senate, the House, and the White House.

Four more years of Gov. Paul LePage. How many more poor people will die before their time over the next four years because they could not afford health care and Maine’s governor refuses to accept federal Medicaid funds to cover their treatment? It’s hard to say exactly, but the answer is surely dozens, quite possibly hundreds, maybe even thousands. Ponder that when you’re alone in the voting booth and see if it doesn’t raise some goosebumps.

Meanwhile, we can revel in the terror LePage is creating over the presence of a nurse in Maine who does not have Ebola and who would be the first to quarantine herself if she did show symptoms. And voters in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District can spook themselves with the knowledge that both major-party candidates want to ban travel to African countries struggling with the disease, thus exacerbating the isolation that allows the epidemic to flourish there.

Eliot Cutler. On Wednesday, the man whose gubernatorial bid will very likely lead to the nightmare scenario described above held a press conference during which he said the campaign has been “locked in the grip of fear” caused by heavy spending on political ads. This conference followed the release of a new minute-long commercial for Cutler’s campaign. On the candidate’s website, there’s a link beneath the commercial asking voters to give the multimillionaire lawyer and businessman their money so he can spend more of his fortune to keep the political ad on the air. This guy’s arrogance is nothing short of shocking.

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Bears in the Forest City. Whether or not you support the referendum to ban the baiting, trapping and hounding of bears, you have good reason to be disturbed. Opponents of the ban can soak in the scare tactics being employed by the “No on 1” campaign, which is running ads claiming the beasts will attack people, even in suburban Portland, if the referendum passes. Proponents of the ban can face the unsettling reality that the Maine game wardens and wildlife biologists purportedly dedicated to protecting us are more dedicated to making us unnecessarily fear for our children’s lives. As this newspaper, which opposes the ban, editorialized on Wednesday, “advocating for a ‘no’ vote based on fear is dishonest, and doing so with public resources compounds the wrong.” And the terror.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.