The Wolf Eats Girl Scouts (p83-p84)

(Setting:  Freeman lets a little reality disrupt his usual apathy.)

Freeman gazed out the window at the Pentagon across the water as his limousine passed a Girl Scout troop marching in formation across the bridge. The innocent young girls bounded merrily against the imposing backdrop of the headquarters of history's deadliest arsenal. With cheerful, pre-pubescent voices, they sang the children's ditty "It’s a Small, Small World", painting a vibrant portrait of the freshness of youth. For just a moment, Freeman was a young boy again. Joy filled his heart, the carefree joy that makes a little boy throw a ball in the air and chase it, or toss a stick for his dog to fetch, the fearless joy blissfully ignorant of toil and mortality. It was the joy that gives meaning to life.

His youthful flashback was short-lived. The juxtaposition of the pixyish girls against the morbid silhouette of the Pentagon made joy an alien emotion. "They're wrong", he sadly thought to himself. "It's not a small, small world. It's a big, bad world with big, ugly adults waiting lasciviously in the shadows to swallow up the trusting children of their own species. The Big Bad Wolf is not a fairy tale myth, and there are millions of Little Red Riding Hoods destined for the Beast's insatiable jaws. Today, the young girls of the world are sugar and spice and everything nice, but some of them will eventually die in a senseless Asian war and others will grow up to die from starvation in a desolate Russian gulag. A generation ago, young Jewish girls were playing stickball one day, and the next day they were floating up as ashes belched from Nazi furnaces. The wolves ruling the world have deceived children into believing there are guardian angels protecting them, and that these guardian angels work in their governments."