This week a rabbit ran in front of my daughter's car. Most people would have shrugged and kept driving. Not my daughter. She went back, put her hazards on and sat with the rabbit until the wildlife rescue people could come and pick it up. It had a severely broken back leg and had to be put to sleep, but how much better for that little rabbit than lying injured in the road waiting for another car to hit it?
Most people wouldn't care. Or even if they did, it would be fleeting and not enough to warrant time out of their day. It was just a rabbit, after all.
In the scheme of things, that little rabbit is miniscule. Every day, somewhere in the world, whales are killed in the name of "science", elephants and rhinos are killed for their tusks, people are beaten up and even killed over their sexuality, suicide bombers kill civilians on buses, and someone will enter a school, a youth camp or a cinema and randomly kill people they don't know. We collectively feel sad and voice our disgust, but few of us will take any positive action to stop the carnage. We have become conditioned to violence.
We are a society that laughs at people's painful mistakes. We send the video to You Tube or upload photos to "Fail" websites. We may express indignation and disgust about these behaviours - and never more so than when children or animals are involved - but we become accomplices when we share them, even if our sharing is an attempt to publicise our disgust. All we have succeeded in doing is giving the perpetrators their 5 minutes of fame.
We have become guilty of collective inaction. We see the problems of the world as too hard to do anything about, so we voice our disgust at some atrocity, shrug and move on. Maybe, if more people were like my daughter and went back and took time out of their day to care for a living creature, we could finally begin to move towards collective action.
I am a very proud parent.
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