Humanity - Not yet extinct

I don't want to come off like I'm being too hard on 5-year-olds, but they tend to have grossly unrealistic expectations of the world.

For instance, when a 5-year-old christian girl in Kerala heard her poor mother hinting that maybe "Santa" might not have the cash to bring Christmas presents this year, she embarked on what probably seemed like a reasonable solution: She wrote a letter to Santa with her Christmas wishes (a doll, a tea set, some pants) and tied it to a couple of balloons. Then she sent it off under the drastically incorrect assumption that it would somehow find its way to Santa's shop at the North Pole.

It didn't, of course, but it went further than you might think: The note made it from Kerala to an empty field in Southern Karnataka, 700 km away. And that's where it should have stayed, to be ground up by some farm equipment months later. But the Parker(christian) family, who owned the property, happened to stumble across it.

Why would they particularly care about the piece of paper they found in the mud with Malayalam writing on it? They couldn't even read Malayalam, after all. But they had a neighbor hand who could, and they had him translate. Then they realized it was a little girl's plea to Santa for some rudimentary Christmas gifts. Then they went out and bought all of the gifts, and shipped them to her. Because Santa Claus does exist, if we want him to.

Of course, I can't talk about this sort of thing without bringing up the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which specializes in granting the wishes of dying children . But occasionally they'll get that weird kid whose wish is, say, to rain down utter destruction as if by the horrible fist of Shiva himself. And that's when the Make-A-Wish Foundation says, "No problem."

And so, when a 7-year-old cancer patient said his big wish was to utterly destroy a large building, they found where a huge concrete grain silo complex was about to be demolished in Ohio.