I don’t often read the paper.  The news seems to stick in my mind and haunt me.  It follows me around, begging for a solution.  “The world has problems!  What are you going to do about it?”  It’s not that I don’t care.  I care too much and  get overwhelmed.  Then the melancholy sets in.  I try to let it wash over me, to not give too much attention to the negative.  I think negativity feeds negativity, so I try to empathise then move on.
Yesterday however, I read a story about a lady who intentionally drowned a possum in her garbage bin!  There was a lot of feedback from the community, some commenting on how sad it was, others making note that possums were pests and they should all be drowned.
Now I’m not a possum lover or hater.  But I have had my encounters.  Many times I have visited rural playgroups and had to discourage the children from eating the possum droppings off the path.  Once I sat with a dying possum on the grass. Despite the obvious outcome, I stayed until he passed away.   As an adolescent I would lie in bed at night and listen to our cat fight with the possums in our roof.  On our honeymoon the MOTH and I dined alfresco at a tropical rainforest restaurant where the possums wandered in and we fed them scraps of bread.  My Gran frequently has her phone calls disconnected by the possum that lives on top of her fridge.   It climbs down to sit on her head and accidently stands on the “hangy uppy bit.”  I guess my point is, there’s a pretty good picture of a possum in my head and now it’s drowning in a bin.  I wonder sadly at the cruelty of  this.  This woman isn’t a warrior out feeding her family.  She doesn’t hunt for sport, or work in an abattoir.   And yet her response to an annoying situation was the premeditated killing of an innocent creature.
I find the arrogance of humanness astounding.  Build your house in someone else’s backyard, take over then start killing the locals if they mess up your bins at night.  I guess that is the history of the world.

I feel sorry for this lady.  Not a condescending sorry either.  Often people are pushed to extremes.  And it’s the extremes that worry me.  Where must she be in her life that killing became the next obvious solution to her problems?  “Wits end” has a lot to answer for!