Wolf! Wolf!

Most of you will be familiar with the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" attributed to a slave named Aesop in Greece, somewhere around 650 BCE. In short, if you call the alarm to gain attention when there is no actual problem, you will eventually be completely ignored where there really IS a wolf snacking on your toes. I believe this tale is still told to children, as it certainly does still apply.

I happen to live near a school with very small children, whom are occasionally allowed to play outside. Occasionally, I can hear them playing and laughing and the occasional squeal of surprise/joy/rage. More often though, what I hear is blood curdling screams, which sound for all the world like a wolf has entered the playground, and is crunching their bones to splinters. I assume that is NOT what is actually happening, since the adults assigned to watching them appear to have little interest in the carnage playing out before them.

These are not happy peals of laughter, not even screams of feigned fear and amazement. These screams are imbued with every bit of life or death fear the child possesses, at the maximum volume available to the small but shrill lungs. The screams are also not short in duration, or occasional, they are continuous and lung emptying wails of terror. The problem is, there is no actual danger or inciting event. It's about getting attention -- just like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

You may be thinking "This grouchy old crank is just annoyed at a noisy neighbor. I would know the difference between a scream from a child in real danger and one that's lost possession of a playground toy." While it's possible that you could tell the difference, my point is that I cannot, and only one of us will be in a position to rush to their aid and fight off the wolf.

Speaking of the wolf -- maybe that's the problem. What modern child knows anything at all about the real danger a wolf would pose, or what it would be like to be watching over sheep, far from the village? Aren't wolves like doggies? Sheep are definitely not threatening, and kinda cute (sheep are actually stupid creatures that invent new ways to die while they sweat lanolin and bleat loud enough for any local wolves to easily locate them.) The threat model posed by a predator which is nearly impossible to encounter in the wild, which has resulted in only three documented attacks against humans in North America in recorded history -- is incomprehensible to modern children.

So, if we are to use the general concept from the fable, we would need to use a threat that modern children would actually regard as frightening. Here is our problem. The only things that modern children would actually regard as truly frightening are so heinous that it would be borderline abusive to even refer to them as the potential consequences of "crying wolf." We would appear to have no possible way of explaining to children that making everyone around you believe that you are dying on a very regular basis is generally a bad idea. I suppose we could breed wolves in captivity and release them apon suburbia, but at this point I expect I would still just turn the music up a couple of notches to drown out the screams.

n.b. My actual suburban neighborhood is actually pretty overrun with the wolf's small scrawny cousin, the coyote. I personally have no fear of coyotes, as I know for a fact that just before they might get me, an anvil will fall on their head as they fall into a crevasse.