injustice never ends

It's the little things that affirm for me that I am working in the appropriate field. If I weren't doing something close to what I'm doing, I think I'd be in the wrong place. I'll give you a couple of examples.

I went to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie the other night (Dead Man's Handbag, or whatever). Did you see the first one? Remember the skinny, oafish pirate with the troublesome wooden eye? Well, in the new movie there's a scene with him trying to rescue his eye back from the ghosty skeleton monkey. They're on a wrecked ship and the monkey is, predictably, jumping from sail to sail with the eye in paw as the pirate is in frantics trying to get it back. Everyone in the theater was laughing, as well they should of been. It was meant to be funny. I even laughed a bit. But under my laughter I couldn't help but feel sorry for the guy. I sat for a full 10 seconds or so worrying about this fictional pirate's life condition. I was thinking "You know, that's really not funny. He's obviously poor and couldn't afford proper medical treatment to begin with. If that damn monkey loses his eye, how will he get another one? Artificial eyes, whether wooden or not, certainly weren't easy to come by back then. He must be really upset and hopeless right now. He's had such a hard life. This is just one more thing for him to worry about. Hasn't he suffered enough at the hands of that cruel world?" I swear to you...I was really processing all of this during that 10 second scene. I got all teary eyed. If I was going to analyze it, I should have gone in from the angle of: the reality is that he probably deserved losing an eye after all the thieving and pillaging he devoted himself to over the years. Karma, baby.

What? Oh, yeah. This isn't a real person I'm talking about here.

On to the next example. There's a commercial currently airing for some type of kitty litter. It shows a cute lil' orange kitty on the internet searching ask.com (or something) for his litter box. The point of the advertisement is that the litter absorbs odor so well, you won't even notice your litter pan. Clever, huh? When the internet is no help, he calls information...and he lets out this sad, pathetic meow...pleading for an answer. As cute as it is, I just feel so badly for the kitty. Cats don't ask for much. All they need is food, water, love, and a litter pan to shit in. (Or, if it's Allie's kitty, a litter pan to shit NEXT to.) I can only assume that the little guy has been holding it in all day so that he doesn't have to go in a houseplant or on the bathroom rug, and nobody understands. Nobody even cares! This is all very upsetting to me, as you can tell. It's an atrocious defacation on the dignity of domestic felines.

It's a good thing I'm working with the homeless and impoverished and not within the pirate community or for the SPCA. If so, I'd get no sleep at night.