I love a good documentary.  When I was in television news, I produced several ”mini-docs,” and I appreciate what it takes to tell a true story in provocative, interesting ways.

My Sundance Film Festival  schedule is always doc-heavy.  I was especially looking forward to Cane Toads: The Conquest  in 3D.  (The director introduced it as “Avatoad.”)

It was educational, and it was also hysterically funny.  The audience howled with laughter, and I was guffawing along with the rest of the crowd.  And I’m still feeling terrible about that.

The documentary details the history of cane toads in Australia, where they now run rampant and are a horrible nuisance. (Imagine your lawn alive with hundreds of toads. And they’re poisonous. Pets who bite them die.)

Aggrieved Aussies employ an imaginative variety of methods to rid themselves of the pestilent toads.  It’s like a Road Runner cartoon  come to life, complete with toads strapped to fireworks and launched in an explosive shower of aerial pyrotechnics.  One man demonstrates his prowess at running over toads in the road.  With each squish, splat, and pop, the audience laughs harder.  I was right there with ‘em.  It was funny.  Except it isn’t.

Back in my TV news days, I reported on some Hare Krishna  devotees who did not make a move to brush away the flies that buzzed around them.  They did not kill anything.  I thought they were nuts, not even responding like a normal human. I mean, who doesn’t shoo a fly?

In the decades since then, I’ve become more sensitive to the way we humans think so much life is disposable, for our own convenience.  Anyone who isn’t a vegan endorses killing for their own convenience. I find it interesting that someone who is so pro-life when it comes to human babies thinks it’s funny to say “There’s plenty of room for all of Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.” 

I’m still eating meat.  My family still engages in fishing and we allow hunting on our property.  But I no longer step on insects if I can avoid it, and I’m likely to help an arachnid out the door instead of smushing it in my home.  So I haven’t evolved as much as PETA  might like, but I’m not as insensitive as I used to be.

I am still feeling queasy about my helpless laughter as the toads exploded.

Was I influenced by the crowd? (I don’t think so. I think I would have laughed if I were alone.)  What is there inside me that was so amused by the macabre panoply of execution methods?

Last night I saw The Shock Doctrine  and there were some shots of the Abu Ghraib atrocities .  The military personnel involved thought the naked poses of their prisoners were funny.

Today I am meditating about what I have in common with those torturers, and I am sensitized to the cultural cues that encourage laughter at the genuine suffering of another.

The Director of the Sundance Film Festival , John Cooper , told a true story as he introduced the documentary “Cane Toads: The Conquest.” 

Every year, the Sundance Institute  conducts filmed interviews with over a dozen directors whose films are featured in that year’s festival. In 2000, Mark Lewis  was one of the chosen. His documentary that year was The Natural History of the Chicken.  At the end of these interviews, the directors are usually asked, “What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years?”  Mark replied, “I’d like to do something on the cane toads of Australia.” 

It’s exactly ten years later, and Mark’s 3-D documentary on cane toads is here at Sundance.

Isn’t that a wonderful example of intention in action?  Name it and claim it? What you can conceive and believe you can achieve? What you think about you bring about? (Add your own cliche here) 

Intention is a powerful thing.  What intentions are setting up root systems and taking hold right now?  What will blossom ten years from now?