HUMOR: You Thought Halloween Was Scary? Just Wait…

Many of the residents of Stinkwater Springs, Colorado celebrated Halloween yesterday, and will spend the day, today, eating leftover Snickers and Tootsie Rolls. Other than the occasional freaked-out two-year-old, most of the community celebhttps://pagosadailypost.com/wp-admin/edit.phprants made it through the event without suffering from too much anxiety or fear.

Most of us can recognize a rubber mask when we see one. It’s real people that scare the living daylights out of us.

This past May, Wilkinson College at Chapman University once again conducted its annual survey to find out what, exactly, Americans fear most.

The Chapman University Survey of American Fears sampled the attitudes of 1,207 frightened citizens and concluded that slightly more than 4 percent of Americans are “afraid or very afraid” of ghosts.

5 percent are “afraid or very afraid” of zombies.

Almost 7 percent fear clowns.

But the really scary stuff has nothing to do with zombies or ghosts. Although it might have something to do with clowns.

Here’s what the 1,207 Americans surveyed by Chapman College fear most:

Three out of four people surveyed fear “Corrupt Government Officials.” More than half fear government involvement in health care.

If we had wanted to really terrify children and adults last night, here are a couple of choices we might have considered:

But we also have our own frightening government officials here in Stinkwater, and from what I can tell, they’re out for blood.

The bloodletting is scheduled for November 8. Election Day.

Take Roger Bobble, for example… President of the Stinkwater Conservation And Reservoir Enlargement District (SCARED). Mr. Bobble and his hand-picked team of district board members have placed a tax increase proposal on the November 8 ballot that looks, on the face of it, as harmless as a spring lamb. A few additional dollars added to your property tax bill.

Dig down into the details, however, and you find out that the Conservancy District will be using those few dollars to wine and dine officials from the same Russian construction company that built the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Recent revelations in the weekly Stinkwater SUN have revealed that President Bobble has been making weekly trips to Moscow (at local taxpayers’ expense) and reportedly has a Swiss bank account overflowing with Russian Rubles.

Scary? Wait until you meet Sheriff Dick Valor. The Sheriff has been promoting a much larger tax increase, to fund a 5,000-bed jail smack dab in the middle of Stinkwater. The official story is that the Sheriff will be renting out shared rooms at below-market-rate, to help address the worsening housing crisis in Stinkwater. But an undercover investigation by the Stinkwater Daily Post has produced video footage of the Sheriff telling his supporters:

“We’re going to lock up every stinking Stinkwater voter who votes ‘No’ on my tax increase. That’s why we need 5,000 beds. Pure and simple.”

Election Day, 2017. Get ready to be afraid.

Louis Cannon

Louis Cannon

Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.