By allowing ads to appear on this site, you support the local businesses who, in turn, support great journalism.
Word Butter: Bat salad and some circus monkeys
Placeholder Image

Did you hear about the bat salad at Wal-Mart? If not, here’s the scoop: two people in Florida discovered a dead bat in some prepackaged salad they had purchased at their local store. They had already eaten some of the stuff when they found the partially decomposed animal in the bag.

All together now…EW!

The health of those folks is now being monitored by doctors, while the Centers for Disease Control checks for rabies. It’s not likely they would have contracted it in this way, but they’re being checked, nonetheless.

Again…EW.

To be clear, Wal-Mart moved quickly to remove this particular product – Fresh Express Organic Marketside Spring Mix – before anyone else could get any on Saturday. This batch had a production code of G089B19 and a best-if-used-by date of April 14. It was found in a store in Florida, not Georgia.

But this whole thing still gives me the cringe. How the heck did this make it in past people who are supposed to ensure that products are safe for consumption by consumers? Didn’t someone, somewhere along the way, notice a little something wrong with that package? Come on!

Here’s my theory…we’ve become too much of a “not my circus, not my monkeys” society. In other words, if it doesn’t affect me directly, then why should I bother to say or do anything?

You see this attitude in people all the time. There are homeless people standing on a corner in most towns now, and people drive right by them and their signs, ignoring them.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

There are people who are hungry, who don’t have the very basics. We hurry past them, on our way to buy yet another pair of shoes or another purse.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

This kind of attitude, in my opinion, is destroying our society. We must learn to not only connect with one another (put the phones down), but we must also learn to look beyond ourselves and care about other human beings. It is my circus. Those are my monkeys. They’re yours too.

Step up. Grab that bag of bat salad and speak up.