Trick or Treat: The Reverse Polish Notation of Our Hidden Masks

There is nothing quite like a brisk early-November walk along a frosty creek trail to clear the cobwebs from your head. The air has that sharp, metallic bite of late autumn, and the crunch of fallen oak leaves under your boots sets a steady, grounding rhythm. When I stepped back into my kitchen this Monday morning, I ladled out a steaming bowl of homemade vegetable soup, sat down at my desk, and opened my news feed. That peaceful morning glow collided head-on with a grim reality: it looked like the country had experienced a startling wave of Halloween weekend shootings.

As a retired software engineer who studied digital electronics in college and repaired mainframes in the Vietnam-era Army, I am wired to look for the underlying logic when a system malfunctions. Back in my early engineering days, we lived by our Hewlett-Packard calculators, which used a wonderfully geeky logic called Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN. Instead of typing "2 + 2," you pushed your numbers onto a memory stack first and hit the operator last. Watching the news this morning, it struck me that Halloween is the Reverse Polish Notation of human behavior: "Trick or Treat" flips into "Treat or Trick." Most people wear a polite, carefully managed costume all year long, pushing their frustrations and fears onto an internal stack. Then, when Halloween arrives and they put on a literal mask, they finally drop the everyday disguise and act out their unfiltered selves.

When that hidden stack overflows, the results are heartbreaking. Because news outlets track different scopes, there is no single national total yet. However, a New York Times compilation of police statements published early Monday counted at least 24 people killed and 94 wounded in shootings over Halloween. Other national roundups focusing on multi-victim or nightlife incidents reported lower, incomplete numbers, with USA Today tallying at least 15 deaths across 11 states, UPI counting at least 8 killed, and the Associated Press noting at least 6 dead and dozens hurt. The deadliest cluster hit Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood early Sunday, where three unconnected shootings in 75 minutes left 4 dead and 15 injured. Violence also struck parties, campuses, and clubs in Jacksonville, Jackson, Birmingham, Bloomington, and Delaware, while separate shootings outside Spirit Halloween stores in California and Michigan each claimed a life.

I found myself wondering if this weekend was worse than usual. Nobody has published a verified comparison against recent holiday weekends yet, and we will have to wait for the Gun Violence Archive to finish validating the Friday-through-Sunday numbers. For context, data cited by The Trace shows that the single deadliest day of 2026 so far was July 5, when 88 people were shot and killed. Still, researchers confirm that Halloween is historically a pressure cooker: criminologist James Alan Fox found that October 31 ranks just behind July 4 and New Year’s Day, with violent crime running 50% to 100% above a normal day.

As a fellow traveler in recovery, I remember the exhausting weight of wearing a year-round mask. When we grow up learning to hide our true feelings just to stay safe, we carry that survival costume into adulthood. Worse yet, today’s big social media platforms act as an algorithmic rage machine, exploiting our unhealed trauma and keeping our nervous systems in constant fight-or-flight to maximize engagement. As a Liberation Technologist, I believe our software should help us heal rather than boil over. By turning toward decentralized protocols and trauma-informed design, we can build calm digital sanctuaries where communities connect authentically without surveillance or manipulation.

We do not have to wait for a dark holiday to let our real selves out, and we certainly do not have to let our internal stack overflow into anger. Today, let’s practice clearing the memory buffer gently. Close the noisy feeds, share an honest conversation over a warm meal, and enjoy the quiet freedom of taking off the mask for good.