There are times that I question whether attending to the news of the day is an exercise in masochism. Today, a perusal of the headlines reveals that hundreds are feared dead in a mudslide in the Phillipines, the Senate Intelligence Committee is likely to bury its collective head further in the sand and decline to investigate the President’s warrantless surveillance program, Bush is requesting another $72+ billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and probably a new bunker for his much besieged Vice President), a Muslim cleric in Pakistan is offering a profit to anyone willing to kill a Danish cartoonist who dissed his prophet, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld maintains that no way no how will the U.S. close the internment camp at Guantanamo and that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is “flat wrong� to propose such, and the Greenland ice cap is breaking up and could eventually cause sea levels to rise by more than 20 feet. Excuse me while I crawl under my desk and curl up in a whimpering ball.

Sometimes, it all feels like more than I can handle or accept. I just want to mentally check out from Chez Misery, refuse to bear witness to any further suffering or injustice or human and environmental degradation. But I can’t do that, at least not entirely. My work requires that I stay checked in. I am a clinical social worker in the employ of an outpatient community mental health clinic, working predominately with children and their families. My job involves bearing witness to human suffering and dysfunction and using the tools at my disposal to lessen such. Of course, given the current economic and political landscape, I am oft presented with too few tools or ones that are inadequate to the task at hand. On many occasions, I have shared with colleagues my sense that I have been given a screwdriver to do a hammer’s job, knowing that, should I fail to use it (or use it and fail), the powers that be will be more than happy to offer me tweezers instead. So I make do.

I am tired of making do, though. I am tired of all the bullshit and Bushwa. And I am angry and saddened—to the very depths of my soul. I know that it sounds self-pitying to offer these words, particularly in light of the greater suffering of those in Iraq, Darfur, New Orleans, the Phillipines, and probably just down the street. Nonetheless, this is my reality, and these are my feelings. They matter. As do yours. As do anyone’s. Care to share?