When you live in a small, rural community, your bright
points are few and far between, and you usually have to invent them. It’s a cliché
that happens to be true that life is simpler in places like the area where I
grew up, which tend not to have movie theatres, giant concert venues or live
performances… but that also tend not to have high crime or other things that
come along with life in large cities.
It’s easy for an outsider to make fun of some of the ways
that people in small towns find to entertain themselves. Like, say,
recreational lowering of wild animals. Or cow bingo. (Which is AWESOME.) But I
have a lot of treasured memories of wonderful times with the people I grew up
around – spaghetti suppers, draw-down fundraisers, street festivals that draw
entire thousands of people. And if someone who lives with easy access to an art-house
theatre wants to roll their eyes at that, then that’s their issue.
So, about 20 years ago the owner of a convenience store
in Brasstown, N.C., got the idea of hosting a New Year’s Eve celebration whose highlight is lowering a live possum in a cage. It’s turned into an evening-long
family-friendly event complete with gospel choirs and a womanless beauty
pageant, and it’s put Brasstown on the map to the point where even CBS News has come out to cover it.
But then the Brasstown drop got the attention of PETA,
which last year took a break from its regular schedule of exploiting young naked women and desecrating graves to file a lawsuit against the drop
organizers. PETA’s legal issue was that the drop didn’t have a permit to
temporarily hold a wild animal. Brasstown played it safe this New Year’s a
dropped a box painted with a picture of a possum, but that wasn’t the end of
it.
This week, our General Assembly passed a law giving the N.C.
Department of Environment and Natural Resources the authority to issue the
appropriate permit, over PETA’s continued protest. Now, I have plenty of
problems with our current state government and their inability to focus on “jobs,
jobs, jobs” as they promised when elected, but I’m with them on this one. Sure,
there are more pressing issues. But this was a simple fix to a problem that
wasn’t even a problem until an out-of-state organization with a history of TV
camera chasing decided to make it a problem. (As long as we’re on the “more
pressing issues” train… the biggest animal cruelty issue in America is a little
town kidnapping a possum once a year? Really?)
Is the possum drop cruel? The animals used each year aren’t
physically harmed. I can see, though, how the experience would be terrifying.
One minute you’re a possum going about your business trying to dodge cars or
whatever possums do, and the next you’re trapped in a plexiglass box suspended
over hundreds of screaming humans. The noise, the lights – watch that CBS story
and see how that possum is huddled in the corner of its cage. It doesn’t look
like it’s basking in the attention, that’s for sure. It’s probably no more
traumatic than deliberately scaring your puppy for YouTube hilarity, but still.
And, yeah, I know, it’s a frackin’ possum and 20 of them just got run over in the
time it took me to type this sentence… but still.
So, personally, I hope the people in Brasstown keep
lowering the heck out of their possums. But I’d also advise them to avoid bad
PR by making more of an effort not to traumatize the New Year’s possum. Is it
possible to acquire a possum or three, raised from birth and tended year-round,
like Punxatawney Phil, so that the New Year’s Eve event wouldn’t be such a
shock to its system? I smell a new local celebrity.
Don’t stop, Brasstown. I know I’ve never been to your town… but
I’ve been there. I may be projecting when I say this, but whatev. You’re a
great community of people who care about one another and about your home, and
it’s the small places like yours all over this country that make us what we
are. Don’t stop.
And PETA needs to just go away. When was the last time
they accomplished anything but getting themselves in the paper?
