If your over 12, no trick-or-treating for you!





In Belville, Illinois, trick-or-treaters are being restricted. If you are over twelve, you cannot go out on Halloween unless you want to be fined. I think this is a really dumb idea.

First off, a lot of people might not even follow this law. Some people get so into Halloween that they would rather go out and risk being stopped by a police car than sit at home. Secondly, how can a police man know what age a kid is? If they are wearing masks and body suits, how can a police man tell if it is even a kid? Many kids will very likely be upset with this new law. Halloween is many kid’s favorite holidays. They get to go out and get free candy, what kid wouldn’t like it? On the other hand, there have been many incidents with teenagers being destructive on Halloween night. This was probably the motive of the people when they thought of this law. They don’t want stupid teenagers going around setting buildings on fire or tee-peeing houses. This would be a hard controversy to decide. Do you not let the kids go trick-or-treating all together? Or should you just let them go and then try and keep control of the bad kids? Obviously, the people of Belville decided to take the first route. Personally, I don’t think that is a good idea. Many kids will be mad at this decision. Many kids will go out and trick-or-treat anyways. Plus, like I mentioned earlier, how could the police man even make sure the child is under twelve? It doesn’t seem logical. What if they are wearing a mask? What if they are wearing a suit that covers their whole body? Also, if the police men are driving around looking for older kids, couldn’t they just drive around looking for suspicious behavior? I think this idea had a good concept behind it, but I doubt it will work effectively.

Is Leblouh a Way to Attract a Soul Mate, or an Unhealthy Threat to Women's Lives?

Leblouh is a tradition practiced Mauritania. Women are forced to sit in rooms and eat for at least 90 days; men in Mauritania admire obese women. They believe they will find a husband if they force fatten themselves.

Leblouh is unhealthy and threatening to the lives of many women in Mauritania.

           Young women in Mauritania have two choices. One, they eat until they bulge, or two, they get beaten brutally."My mother started fattening me forcibly when I was 13-years-old. She used to beat me to eat more oiled couscous and fat lamb's meat. Each time I thought my stomach would explode," Selekeha Mint Sidi of Mauritania remembers. This type of tradition puts the young ladies at a risk of many health problems. Vomiting is a daily habit for girls in Mauritania. Their stomach cannot even contain all the food that is being stuffed into them. When you vomit, the acid sticks to your teeth. After a while, your teeth will turn as yellow as a ripe banana and then they will begin to rot away one tooth at a a time. Why do these women need a man so bad? The only thing they will need after this, is a pair of dentures. Mar Jabero Capdeferro, in charge of gender programs for the U.N. Population Fund in Mauritania, states, "Nowadays, the girls are force-fed with chemicals used to fatten animals...they're very fat, in their forties and fifties, they cannot even move, they have hypertension, diabetes, and so on." The chemicals used for fattening animals, obviously should not be used on young girls like this. It is repulsive to think girls are being forced to drink this. If you do these horrendous things to your body, it will strike back. As Capdeferro says, when the women get older they are faced with things like diabetes and hypertension. Diseases like these are fatal. Is finding a soul mate really worth facing death?

Is Bussing Really Worth $400 a Year?

          In Massachusetts, there have been many heated debates over whether to make parents pay for their child to ride the bus to school or not. Since the beginning, public transportation to school has been the easy route for many parents. It’s free, good for the environment, plus they can get to work earlier and not have to worry about getting their child to school. Having a bus just makes life easier for everyone.

On average, if the proposal goes through, parents would have to pay about $400 a year per child. If you have two kids, that’s $800 a year. If you have three kids, that’s $1,200 a year. Let’s not even think about someone having more than three kids. Imagine going from paying nothing to all of a sudden paying over $1,000 for bussing! This is a very big change and most Americans would not be able to handle it. The majority of families do not have this kind of money to just give to the transportation system, so the busses will most likely be very empty. If they only have a handful of students on the bus, they will probably raise the price even more to accommodate all of the expenses with the little amount of people paying. Then those people, who already pay the $400, won’t want to pay anymore so they will probably leave the system too. Basically, there won’t be any students riding the bus.

Let’s say a car emits x amount of pollutants into the air on the way to school. There are 50 kids driving to school in 50 different cars because their parents could not afford for their child to ride the bus. That’s 50x amount of pollutants being emitted into the air just for one day for one school. If there is 500,000 schools in the U.S., that’s 25,000,000x pollutants in one day. There is at least 200 days of school. Therefore, per year, at least 5,000,000,000x pollutants are contaminating our air because bus transportation is too expensive. Now, if all these students just rode the bus, that number would drop dramatically. Riding a bus helps the environment. We can’t help the environment though if we cannot afford it.

Expensive bussing leads to no students wanting to ride the bus. No students riding the bus leads to parents taking their kids to school which leads to more pollutants being emitted in our air. That leads us to a bad environment. The list is endless.

This proposal will just turn everything into a huge mess.