Halloween is a wonderful holiday!

People from all different walks of life come together to dress up in weird ways. All the nerds get to finally be themselves and feel accepted without even dressing up. Even the witches on campus dress up as witches to be ironic.

And then we have the other people that give no effort at all. This usually results in a thoroughly unimaginative costume.

You know what I’m talking about; the kid that throws a bedsheet over his head and is a “ghost,” the teen wearing their favorite tie-dye and is a “hippie,” the basketball player who goes as a “basketball player.”

There are some kids that think they’re clever and want to make you think they’re creative, but don’t let yourself be fooled. Any costume that involves a pun is a big red flag.

While someone was obviously smart, funny and creative enough to think of it, the person standing in front of you isn’t and got it off a Buzzfeed article.

I shouldn’t be so harsh. As karma would have it, there are sandbaggers on the other end as well; the parents that give out apples, raisins, pencils, toothpaste, plastic spider rings (you know what I’m talking about), banana taffy; I could go on.

If these items aren’t familiar to you as an adult, just know that these are realities that kids face every year and I would ask you stand in solidarity with them. When I was a kid, I actually walked up to someone’s house who forgot it was Halloween, and they gave me some coupons they found in their drawer.

And no, the coupons weren’t even for candy.

The people I despise most, however, are not the evangelizers giving out religious tracts, or the old guy that cares way too much about your dental hygiene, but the ones that refuse to participate at all. They shut off their lights, lock their doors, put up a for-sale sign, whatever they can to not participate. Sometimes they’ll leave a pile of candy in a bucket, which is also a dirty lie.

In reality, they knowingly condone the inevitable pillaging from some unsupervised child or more likely teenager.

Most days of the year I think about the philosophical conundrum: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” On Halloween, I give it a spooky twist: “Why do kids with creative costumes get terrible treats?”

While this may be a future course offered at Goshen College, I am prepared to save you the trouble and offer you an answer right now.

When I am an adult and I give out treats for Halloween, I will give objectively better treats to kids with objectively better costumes. Now, some people might think this isn’t fair and say I’m not treating all kids equally. I would say well at least I am treating all kids. And after all, a treat is better than a trick.

The time is now to bring all the lazy Halloween brats to justice. Despite my political stances tending to lean more fiscally and socially liberal, I am Halloween conservative. No matter how much you sugarcoat it, this is one issue I won’t budge on. If we want to address the freeloaders that plague our social welfare programs, we must drill into the root canal of the problem. That is, there are kids being trained at a young age that they’re allowed to slack off and still get rewarded with candy. This problem is worsened by those kids’ airhead parents that turn off their lights, lock their door, and leave circus peanuts outside their door on Halloween. Addressing the issue of candy discrimination in our society is the first step in reconciliation to all the hardworking, creative kids that have received vegetables on Halloween.