It’s funny that national door-to-door canvassing and trick-or-treating fall so closely with one another, in that short coincidence from which the last day of one month is linked together with the first Tuesday of the next. Both are like a certain kind of holiday. One ancient. The other ought to be a holiday.
In that rounding of the neighborhoods in the dark and on foot toward doorknobs, all these households often leave the light on for others and — less frequently now than in those ancient days of my own childhood — let their children journey off past sunset as heroes and villains, archetypes hunting for confectionary rewards.
And towards participatory democracy and voter advocacy, some often walk door to door convincing others not that they are some other, but that we are more similar, you and I, even when we stand on opposite sides of a shared threshold.
