The Boy Who Cried Wolf-A Modern American Tale

One of my favorite fables by Aesop is, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The basic idea of the story is, a shepherd boy is ultimately bored to death sitting on a hillside watching his sheep, so he ups the ante a bit & decides to amuse himself & cries out, “Wolf!” “Wolf!” It causes locals in his village to come tearing up over the hillside to help the boy chase the wolf away, and of course as soon as they get there, they find no wolf, but just a laughing boy who has taken pleasure in fooling them.

The boy continues to stage the outburst at regular intervals & each time he does, the villagers come running & they find no wolf and remained pissed as ever. Later on, the boy sees a real wolf, and cries out in great anguish, but there are no villagers to be found. When the boy hasn’t returned to the village by sunset with his flock of sheep, however, the villagers become concerned and go looking for the boy who is sitting atop the hill weeping.

When asked by the boy why didn’t the villagers come, he was told by an elderly man, that no one believes a liar even if he is telling the truth. The same holds true when we are younger we are told by our parents, relatives or guardians not to lie.

As we get older, some of us tend to forget that bit of advice & even more so, we are encouraged to lie. Well yes, that sounds a little daft, but it is true. If anything, we as children, then later as adults are told that telling a little white lie is alright every now and again.

Television & cable programs are full of lies, cheating & deceit. Movies & music also encourage us to lie, cheat, steal, double-cross, backstab & well, the list goes on forever. Perhaps the greatest lies some parents, relatives or guardians tell their children are the great fabrications of Santa Claus & the Easter Bunny. Neither exists. And yet parents use it as a tool to whip their kids into shape between the months of October & April.

So, I kind of have to wonder about the rash of fabricated stories and lies that have swept across our nation over the past few years, including; last week, when a woman from Duluth, Georgia who got cold feet just days before she was to married, invented a kidnap & rape story, had everyone worried, including her fiancée & the police who combed the countryside looking for any trace of her. She turned up in New Mexico, unharmed. Police are considering arresting her & the man who planned his life out with her still wants to marry her.

Then about a year or so ago, closer to home, up in Madison, Wisconsin, a University of Wisconsin college student was reported missing from her apartment for several days, the Madison police, her friends, family & others combed the immediate area for any trace of her, blitzed the area with flyers, for what was called a reported abduction.

There were major news stories on the event here in the Chicago area, as well as the nation when it occurred. But alas, she turned up a week or so unharmed & later confessed to making up the entire story. She even went as far to buy duct tape & rope to make it look real.

Then there are the assorted stories of missing children reported by frantic parents who cry desperately for help, thereby enlisting entire droves of friends, family members & law enforcement to go out looking for the missing children, only to have the same frantic parents confess to a brutal murder a week or so later.

It’s not enough to see this in the media almost everyday, as it tends to be dragged out on radio & television talk-shows, besides, it makes for good ratings & anything that tends to shock, outrage & otherwise shatter our once sheltered minds, is good for the soul every once in a while, don’t you think?

While in a vocal lesson about a year ago, my 2nd vocals teacher Miss Lexlax, started telling me some really outrageously unreal stories, one of them to wit, that her boyfriend an ex-law enforcement agent at-the-time, told her that there was some highly devised plan to wipe Chicago off the face of the map completely by blowing it up with some sort of nuclear bomb material.

She told me not to tell anyone & although it seemed kind of odd for her to tell me this kind of story, especially when she could have been sworn to secrecy too, just as she advised me to do, I ignored her wishes & decided to go ahead and tell someone else anyway. Who could believe such a story anyway?

Every time I hear one of these kinds of stories, either reported in the news or otherwise, I just shake my head and wonder, what is the point of staging an event that never existed other than to draw attention to one’s own sorry state? Some that do this are looking for attention that they might not have received early on in their formative years. Others blame mental illness. Still others blame the media for their own mistakes.

Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies are taking back their wasted efforts by considering filing charges against those who fabricate kidnappings, abductions or other forms of creative crime, in order to get back some restitution. And here I thought only policemen & FBI agents did that sort of creative crime process with sting operations and the like!


I guess some of the population wants to get in on some of the action too. By all means then, let them! Let them play-act, let them have their 15 minutes of fame, let them collect newspaper clippings & above all, let them suffer the consequences too. Just like those of us who have to listen with concern, anger & frustration when we learn it’s all a sick hoax staged by a lost pathetic soul.

There are too many shepherds crying wolf these days. Don’t you think it’s about time we put a stop to these wolves in shepherd's clothing?