Constable: Blackface wasn't OK when you were a kid either

It's 2018, and some adults still embrace the Halloween attitudes they had as children trick-or-treating a generation ago.

On a day when hatred of Jews fuels mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue, a father on Facebook rips people who "dare" to criticize him for donning a Nazi uniform and dressing his 5-year-old son as Adolf Hitler. He later apologizes.

TV talking head Megyn Kelly is off the air, and her bosses reportedly are working on an exit strategy after she clumsily defended the concept of white people's donning blackface for Halloween costumes.

Two campaign workers for Illinois gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker also were axed for posting a photo of one of them wearing a charcoal beauty mask that looked like blackface.

"When I was a kid, that was OK," Kelly said before she learned that not being "politically correct" simply meant she was wrong.

You can use "when I was a kid" to justify a lot of bad stuff, from embracing the same sensibilities you had at age 12 to still insisting on wearing those striped pants you rocked in college.

"When I was a kid, my dad used to whip me with a belt, and I turned out OK," say people in favor of physically assaulting children.

"When I was a kid, we didn't wear seat belts and took naps on the back window ledge of our Buick, and I turned out OK," say people who don't realize how fortunate they were not to be killed in relatively minor car crashes.

"When I was a kid, nobody was transgender or died from eating peanuts," say those who don't realize people were and did.

"When I was a kid, you could tell a racist joke without people getting their panties in a bunch," say people who don't realize that last half of that sentence can be as offensive as the first part.

Learning the wrongness of things that seemed OK to you in the past is a process. I was a kid when my parents taught me that the N-word my grandma recited in that "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" rhyme was wrong. But I didn't learn that anyone could be offended by my all-white high school's production of "Showboat" in blackface until I got to college in the late 1970s.

TV's Kelly learned that lesson just last week. Suburban witch-burners got their education in 1982.

"Jaycees scrap mock witch burning," read a front-page headline above a Daily Herald story Oct. 29, 1982.

"Under pressure from area clergyman and self-proclaimed witches and warlocks, the Schaumburg Jaycees Thursday canceled a mock witch-burning ceremony scheduled for Halloween," read the story, which, if it were running today, also would cut the "self-proclaimed" modifier.

"With all the whacked-out stuff you see on TV, it didn't seem like we were really doing anything wrong," said the Jaycees president at the time. "The witch-burning was just something to add to our haunted house for the kids, and it was never meant to be defamatory to anyone."

Intended meaning isn't the same as the meaning that society infers. The Arlington Heights Clergy Fellowship, while noting that it didn't consider witchcraft a "bona fide religion," also protested the ceremony because it would be "an enactment of violence toward other humans."

Lisle and Willowbrook also canceled witch-burning events that year. What was "good, clean fun" suddenly was recognized as "an enactment of violence."

People evolve. Attitudes change.

If you defend your Halloween costume (or your everyday opinion) by saying that sort of thing was fine "when I was a kid," you are scary for all the wrong reasons.