Cynical human in a cynical age

[chicken]

There are these kids across the street selling lemonade. They keep yelling "Lemonade!" in the loudest possible voices, and it is REALLY starting to grate on our nerves.

Part of the problem is that we live on an extremely busy street, on which people drive very quickly up a steep hill, so it is extremely unlikely that anyone would even stop to buy some.

Furthermore, the most cynical part for me is that I keep thinking, I don't know these kids, they could have put anything into the lemonade, poison, pee, spit, vinegar, alcohol, who knows? I hate to be so cynical, but this is an age in which little kids hurt each other with guns on purpose or accidentally, an age in which kids get poisoned, razor-bladed apples on Halloween. My worst fear of Lord of the Flies style kids come to the fore. I know there's a 99.9% chance these kids are not like that, but since I can make my own lemonade, and since their voices are so darn grating, I just get really peeved.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, though in an earlier version of this post I said that these stories were all legends, according to snopes there are several actual cases of strangers putting objects such as needles in Halloween treats (but not of stranger-poisonings, apart from one ambiguous case).