I've heard the saying often that everything is political. From campaigning for elected office, to office politics, to arguing with your parents as a kid for that extra trick-or-treating time on the last night in October and now as an adult to keep their respective distance. Hold on to that trick-or-treating meme, because the politics of that extends farther than the debate between parent and child.
From The NYT City Room:
City Room was convinced that the story that Halloween was a critical part of the Congressional debate to extend Daylight Saving Time was one of those questionable Halloween myths, like razors in apples or pins in candy.
Not so. City Room should learn never underestimate the weirdness of the city to our south. Turns out, senators were truly concerned about that extra hour of daylight and its impact on children’s pedestrian safety, going so far as to propose a Halloween Safety Act (various studies show that kids are significantly more likely to hit and killed on Halloween than any other day).
But it gets even stranger than that. The candy lobby also played a significant role into pushing Halloween into daylight saving time, believing that extra hour of trick-or-treating in daylight would spur more candy sales but arguing it would decrease deaths, according to Michael Downing, the author of the Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, an amusing book at the myths and realities behind Daylight Saving Time. (One of the historical points he makes that it was Wall Street, and not farmers, that were the primarily advocates for the clock-tinkering at the start of the last century, as they wanted to eliminate an hour overlap with the London markets’ trading day).
Ah, history and politics go together so well. The candy industry used the safety issue to give some sort of ethical purpose to try and push their profits up at the expense of children's teeth and sugar dependence problems. As the article points out a little further down, the candy industry has been lobbying Congress for some time, going so far as to "put pumpkins filled with candy on the seat of every senator in America.”
Sometimes a little sugary sweetness can pay off!
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