It’s a Horrible World

The news sometimes makes me sad, sometimes bored (Kardashians again, really?). Once in a while the news is interesting.  This week, for some reason, most of the news just made me mad. Then I became depressed. My generally cynical view of the human race increased to a completely cynical/angry view of the human race. Truly. We do not deserve this world.

I don’t believe that I have ever seen so many stories that make my eyes roll before I can even finish the article. Allow me to share some of these. For some reason, it makes me feel better to spread the stupidity of the world around by sharing it with others-just in case you were thinking that this world was doing better lately—-and I won’t even include any of the political stuff.

A Roman Catholic priest has a cousin who is gay-doesn’t everyone? The cousin married his partner….it is legal to do that in many places, in case the Catholic Church hasn’t noticed. The priest provided a reading at his cousin’s wedding. Not a blessing. Not a prayer. Not a sacrament. He did not perform the ceremony. But the Church “rebuked” him for his action and included it in his “permanent record”.  Personally, I hope that more priests have such a “permanent record” in loving their family.

You probably heard about the man who was removed from a plane after an ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend played a hoax which claimed that the guy was dangerous. The hoax was retaliation because the new boyfriend was mad over a photo posted on Facebook. So this guy is pulled off the plane, questioned, and the entire plane is returned to the airport and the other passengers are taken off the plane, too. What a mess! But that is not the interesting part of the story to me. Apparently the victim of the hoax was allowed to rebook his trip, and finally was able to reach his destination in Texas-where he was met by law enforcement and promptly arrested. He apparently had outstanding warrants for his arrest, and when the Texas authorities heard about the hoax they recognized the name and checked. Sure enough, he had a warrant, so they met him and arrested him! Now THAT is the definition of having a bad day!

Those were the “eye rollers”. The next one got my legal hackles up…..

When I represent kids in court, sometimes they have done some pretty awful things. I have kids who have been charged with sex crimes, burglary, assaults, and even thefts. In my world, theft is pretty small potatoes compared to other things. But apparently, other folks disagree. A man in Wisconsin thought his neighbor’s kid was stealing things from him. What to do, what to do? This guy apparently felt it was appropriate to hog-tie the kid, hang him up by the feet and then set his pit bull on him. To add to the punishment, the kid’s dad helped and watched approvingly. Really.

And on this one, my parent hackles were raised to a new height…..

In our area, we have had several recent deaths of teenagers in motor vehicle crashes. I think that there have been about five or six in the past week or so. They are horrible. These are young drivers, on the way to school, coming home from school, a head-on crash at the crest of a hill on a rural road. The deaths themselves are tragic. But the part that made me angry was comments which were posted on the news stories about these deaths. The trolls were out. They had the nerve to speculate about what the kids were doing which caused their own death. In a situation in which a young person died, the comments went back and forth about texting, cell phone use and other possible things a teen may have been doing at the time of the accident. Even in the face of a person posting a comment pointing out their insensitivity of the speculation in light of the tragedy that occurred, the trolls refused to stop. It was unbelievable to me that people who knew absolutely nothing about an accident, did not know the people involved in the accident, and had absolutely no evidence of any kind as to the cause of the accident felt that they could assign blame to a dead teenager.

But there is another local story that was at the top of my list for “It’s a Horrible World”. I cried. It was a series of  stories about Jane, an eight-year-old girl with leukemia. On Sept 4th, we heard that her dying wish was to see a Nickelodeon band called Big Time Rush.  It hadn’t happened. Her mom-wow, what a mom-started a huge social media campaign to try one last time to make it happen. On Sept 5th, we learned that the band was going to make her wish come true.  On Sept. 6th, she died before the wish could be granted. This is a little girl who wore fun, bright-colored wigs to hide her loss of hair. She made and sold duct-tape wallets to raise money for children’s cancer research. She should not have died. She so should not have died before her simple wish was granted.

The world sucks big time this week.

Don’t even get me started on politics.

 

 

 

 

 

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