THE LITTE WAGON THAT STUNK: A GRIM B'TOWN FAIRY TALE

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Part I

Once upon a time there was a very small village with lots of people in it.

There were so many, many people that most would have thought it was a city. The village did what villages do.

Children grew up sometimes holding funny ideas until convinced by their friends to abandon them or risk being shunned as spoiled rotten. Occasionally as happens one or two would manage to slip through childhood still harboring these notions. Generally they just grew up living miserable lives blaming everyone else for their unhappiness and that was the end of it.

BUT when there were enough people in the little village a strange thing happened. These people who had been destined to live miserable, unloved, and unfulfilling lives started to gravitate toward each other and meet and talk.

They discovered an amazing coincidence: In each case their mommies had told them they were special!

Having been convinced of this fact for their entire lives, when they met each other for the first time they immediately recognized this bond that they held in common, “Why my mommy told me I was special, too!”, they would gush and cry and hug each other and discover all the good and special things about each other that had made their mommies proud.

They came to know each other as “The Good People”, but it would have been bad manners and rude to say that in front of “The Little People” that were less fortunate than themselves and not special at all.  They kept this knowledge among themselves and they just referred to each other as “Important People” in public because that didn’t seem quite so offensive to the Little People, who they found out didn’t like to be called Little People at all.

It wasn’t very long before The Good People discovered that praising each other for how very, very special they were had an almost magical effect: The more money and favors they granted each other, the more they got in return.

Not just money, but praise from the other Good People as well!  Their mommies were right; they were very, very special indeed! The best part was that everything they need to give each other was furnished by the Little People who foolishly used to leave it in big piles on tables in boardrooms and put it in a silly place called the tax rolls.

So the Good People created boards and commissions to put themselves and each other on. These gave the Good People a place to share how special they were with each other and to make rules and recommendations for the money left lying around by the Little People.

 There never seemed to be quite enough to actually do anything really important with so they simply borrowed more and more.

A few of the Little People had spent most of their lives trying to convince the Good People that their mommies had told them that they were special, too. All the Good People had to do was to pat them on the head and tell them that soon they would be good people, too. 

Little People who wanted to be Good People were so foolish and stupid sometimes. The Good People knew that you were born that way and could not simply become Good People because you wanted to, but it was cruel to dash the Little People’s dreams, so they came to be known as The Wannabes. Sometimes the Wannabes worked so, so hard to become Good People that they rose to positions where you would expect to find Good People.

These Wannabes, still being foolish Wannabes, gave the Good People everything they asked for in return for nothing more than the promise that someday they, too, would become Good People.

You know the expression, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people”? Sadly, it often happened that the Good People would give birth to a Wannabe.

Having no worth and no real skills it would have been unthinkable to just cast them into the world of the Little People, where they had little hope for survival.
So the Good People created jobs among themselves for these poor unfortunates and used the free resources from the boards and committees to care for and look after them.

Not content to simply congratulate each other on how very special they were at parties and board meetings, they decided that they needed (and well deserved!) their own parade from time to time to show everyone else how very, very special they were. Some of the Good People decided that they needed a wagon for the parade.

The other Good People thought this was a good idea because quite naturally, any idea proposed by one of the Good People was always a good idea.

 

Next: Part 2: The Good People and Wannabes come up with a new wagon for their parade.