Happy endings not guaranteed
Once upon a time there were three little boys, let’s call them Dick, Jimmy and Jem. Like many little boys, they liked to play with their toy cars. They loved to race them just as fast as they would go and pile them up in great big crashes too. Sometimes one or other would get cross. He would stick his tongue out, call the others silly, and take his favorite toy car away with him. It never lasted long, though, and soon the boys would be back on their hands and knees, pushing their cars across the carpet and making broom broom noises to their hearts’ content.
Of course little boys have to grow up, and all three of them did. As luck would have it, they all found a job where they could still play with their cars, and get paid for it. They could race them, bash them, line them up to compare them and lots and lots of people loved to watch them doing it. In the end, so many watched them doing it that they came to believe they would do it forever. One of them got so big for his boots that he would sometimes trip over his own feet. He would poke his tongue out at the people he didn’t like, call them names and sometimes do even worse. The others would egg him on and laugh at his antics.
Then one day he went too far. He got so cross that he stamped and swore and hit the person who had made him cross. He hurt the man, who had to go to hospital. He got into big, big trouble and in the end he wasn’t allowed to play that game any more. So he gathered up all his toy cars under his arm, and crossed the road to another studio to start all over again…
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Of course, in reality this is a story about four people, not three – but little is heard of the fourth. In a similar way, last year, a story from South Africa became the story of an athlete going to prison, rather than a woman losing her life. So often perspective is the first casualty, don’t you think?
Image: Wikimedia commons
