Broken Systems
I’ve been working with a neighbor on local cat TNR. For those of you not in the know, TNR stands for Trap, Neuter, Return and it aims to control a stray cat population in the community and keep it from exploding out of control. By trapping and sterilizing cats in an outdoor colony, we can keep the colony a manageable size and the cats have a better chance at leading healthier lives without reproducing.
Anyway, neighbor and I have managed to trap and sterilize five cats since the start of this year. It’s not cheap, it takes time and effort, but we’re committed and we’ve found an incredible group of like-minded individuals who offer assistance as well as lend an ear when we want to scream into the void about the never-ending flow of felines.
Today, I found out that a cat we trapped two and a half weeks ago who was already spayed has an owner who came forward to ask why his cat is suddenly microchipped (and microchipped to someone else). This is a cat we had seen on our porch for weeks, feeding from the food that had been left out for an entirely different stray we had been hoping to catch.
She had no collar, no microchip, and no one claimed ownership when her photo was posted to the community groups online. I scoured the lost cat posts in several online groups for hours. Indeed, it seemed as if she was a stray. So imagine our surprise when we caught her and found out she was already sterilized. (I’m grateful for small miracles. At least her owners made sure she wasn’t going to be getting pregnant any time soon.) Still, a sterilized stray is still not entirely unusual. It happens.
But microchipping a cat and suddenly having the owner come forward? Well, in TNR, I suppose that happens, too. Still, I can’t suppress my frustration. We wasted time, energy, and valuable resources trying to help an animal that didn’t need it…all because a human didn’t microchip or collar their cat (or keep it inside). We could have let her go and gone on to catch the next stray that so desperately needed care.
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Last week, the husband and I were supposed to close on the purchase of a piece of land we’re eyeing for retirement. We had one heck of a time finding out how to wire money and it led to a whole lot of extra phone calls, emails, and time in the car as we enlisted several individuals to help. But we did it. Finally wired the money.
Or at least we thought we did. And the bank thought we did.
And that’s why we sat and twiddled our thumbs for a week, waiting for confirmation on the other end that the money was received, celebrating internally while waiting to share the news with the rest of the world. And waiting. And waiting. I finally checked in with the receiving party and—surprise—no money. So we called up the bank on our end, and hey, somehow that wire transfer was cancelled. We’d received no notification of the cancellation, no alert that the money we had committed to pay was somehow not being transferred. So we’ve been sitting here, waiting for money to transfer that was never going to transfer, but trying to sit tight and be good, patient, little clients because the bank told us the process could take up to five business days.
Or, apparently, it can just get cancelled and no one knows why.
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The government is shut down because . Or maybe it’s because the Speaker of the House doesn’t want to swear in a duly elected representative who would be the 218th vote needed to release the Epstein Files.
People are being abducted and kidnapped in the middle of the night in raids that use U.S. military helicopters. Read that again. The military is being used against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. The man in The White House has declared war on half the population and has no qualms about violating the Hatch Act (again and again, sigh) to vilify an entire political party.
The rest of the world is asking why we, as Americans, aren’t doing anything. But protestors are met with gunfire, gas, and flash bombs. Funding is being kept from states that didn’t vote in favor of the wannabe dictator. The U.S. Supreme Court is compromised.
And we wait.
We wait for someone to rescue us. We speak up. We speak out. We protest. And we wait. Once upon a time, America was the nation others would turn to for help against a corrupt regime. Or maybe we were always the bully. Either way, it seems no one is coming to help us. We are just another broken system in a history of so very many broken systems.
