The polite trick-or-treater theory of building a working society
Rob Long
Let me set the scene. Last night, Halloween, a little after 6 p.m., in Manhattan, outside my house.
On my street, Halloween is a big deal. The local block associations have organized street closures, people decorate their townhouses, stoops are threaded with fake spiderwebs, and there are candles and pumpkins at nearly every house. The streets and sidewalk are thronged with little children and parents and the usual way-too-old-for-trick-or-treating kids.
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I am sitting on one of the lower steps of my front stoop, passing out candy. The stairs leading up to the front door are too treacherously steep for a child in a plush costume with limited sightlines and, often, a tail or something to trip on, and my household umbrella insurance policy doesn’t cover what I know would be a nasty lawsuit from heartbroken parents who would blame me for the tumble their child could surely take. So on the advice of counsel and my financial adviser, I have elected to move the candy distribution node to the lowest possible step.
But 6 p.m. is peak Halloween, and the number of children in costumes, arms outstretched, is a little overwhelming, especially when you’re on the bottom step, without a front door to protect you from the sea of short, oddly garbed children, often totally masked, who seem, in the twilight, like a toddler zombie mob from The Walking Dead.
One boy, about 8 or 9, took advantage of the overwhelming numbers by putting his grasping, Spider-Man-gloved hand directly into the candy bag, removing a Spider-fistful of fun-size Kit Kats, Snickers, and Reese’s.
“Hey!” I shouted as he scuttled away, “Don’t be a Goofus!”
He stopped and looked at me quizzically. “What?” he asked.
“A Goofus! Like, from the old comic strip Goofus and Gallant? From Highlights magazine? Don’t they have that anymore?”
But by then, I had lost the moral immediacy of the situation. I had triggered that immutable law: If you’re the one explaining what you mean, you’ve lost the argument. Also, the child’s father was starting to get interested in the goings-on, and I had the distinct feeling that it was possible we’d both end up in the morning paper. Or worse, Twitter.
So I waved the child off and busied myself with the other polite goblins and Elsas gathered around the candy stash.
For the record, Goofus and Gallant is a recurring feature of Highlights magazine, a children’s publication. It’s designed to teach moral lessons and encourage good behavior in children through contrasting examples. Goofus tends to be impulsive, disrespectful, and thoughtless in his actions (in my childhood, I was often called a Goofus), while Gallant is polite, thoughtful, and considerate. Each strip presents a scenario in which the two characters respond differently, highlighting the positive behavior of Gallant and the negative behavior of Goofus. You can always tell which one is which because all of the characters in the Gallant drawings are smiling and happy, while the others in the Goofus panels wear expressions of unhappiness, mortification, and dismay.
Goofus and Gallant isn’t about the big stuff — morality, goodness, that sort of thing. It’s mostly focused on the small issues of day-to-day life, like saying “please” and giving up your seat on the bus for an old person, not interrupting, and not grabbing candy directly from the generous man’s candy stash.
In that way, Goofus and Gallant is sort of a child-centered example of James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows theory,” which posits that a neat and orderly neighborhood, where broken windows are repaired promptly and graffiti is quickly removed, leads to more peace and tranquility up the chain. A child who acts politely and knows not to be grabby-grabby contributes to an overall improvement of child behavior generally. A child who doesn’t gets called “Goofus” and has to endure a lot of dirty looks.
Reading Goofus and Gallant won’t make a child a better person, of course. It’s almost entirely about encouraging good public behavior. What happens in a person’s heart, or conscience, is left unexamined. For all we know, beatific little Gallant might be a closet psychopath or secret Ted Bundy. (His smile, to be honest, is a little creepy.) Still, after a few weeks of very Goofus-y behavior, to put it very mildly, from young people on university campuses and on my front stoop, a movement to reform public behavior seems like a great place to start.
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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.