Life As A Bug

A young woman stopped by my house just as the cat brought home a live mouse to entertain itself by playing with it in front of us.  My visitor commanded the cat to let the mouse go, but the cat paid no attention. She grabbed a broom and chased the cat, but it ran to the far side of the courtyard with its prey. Flailing at the cat with the broom, she ran after it until it slipped out of a gap in the courtyard wall, the mouse still squeaking in its mouth.  Half an hour later, as my visitor was leaving, she stopped to admire a cactus flower.  As her nose homed in on the scent, she suddenly jerked her head back as if a spine had poked her.  She pointed mutely to the flower, her shaking finger zeroing in on a black ant crawling into the blossom.  Backing away from the poet with the cactus, she began brushing down the front of her blouse and stamping her feet because she had noticed a few ants around the base of the pot.  
“Eeew eeew, get rid of them,” she shrieked.  
I turned over a stone, which she perhaps thought I would use to smash the scattering ants, but under the cactus pot was a swarm of the panicked creatures running everywhere.  
She began screaming, hyperventilating, and when she could, shouting,  “Kill them! Kill them!”
I washed away the ants with the garden hose, but she was still shocked and jumpy, and had backed far away from the outbreak.  Her world had been invaded by horrible beasts.  As she was leaving, I asked her, “Can you tell me the difference between an ant and a mouse?”  
“No. What?” she asked, like I had set her a child’s riddle. 
“To some people, cats are a pest,” I said.  “To some cats, the big ones,  humans are a pest. We all have a place on the food chain.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, backing out the door like I was about to ask her for a donation to the Flat Earth Society.
“Maybe you will one day,” I answered.  “When you grow up.”
She tossed her strawberry blonde hair, and I never saw her again.

Recently, there has been a cluster of reports on the news about random killings in various cities, street murders of unrelated individuals at the hands of men who are angry and fed up with life and everyone in it.  Parents of these unhinged young men are often the first ones in the line of fire because family members are easy to demonize.  If a man can kill those known to him, it is a short step to killing strangers.  The innocent victims are annoyances to them, worth no more than rats.  

By nature, men don’t lash out and kill other men, but if they feel threatened, they may turn their fears and prejudices into demons that inhabit other humans. A Ukrainian general recently said about Russian invaders, “We are at war with non-humans.  They are orcs.”  Soldiers understand the technique of dehumanization, but they learn to use this mind-trick only in appropriate circumstances.  When a civilian with a mental imbalance begins to see other humans as less than him, he lashes out.  He might target property at first, but it is more satisfying to squash the life out of a living, breathing pest as if it were an insect. Humans become bugs. If we are threatened by a tiger that sees us as prey, we can overlook its feline beauty, its value as a species, and kill it before we are killed.  Humans have survived by sorting their threat responses into compartments, but sometimes these systems go awry.

We presume that bugs aren’t sentient, but we are selective in our beliefs.  Looked at objectively, shrimp and lobster are no more than large insects of the ocean, yet we see them as culinary delicacies.  There is a growing call against lobsters being boiled alive because we are not sure if they feel pain or not, but it is sure that crayfish don’t fiddle happy tunes when they are plopped into boiling water.  If lobsters feel pain, the same must be true for ants.  If I wash away a nest of ants, I have not only destroyed their physical structure, but created chaos of the ant’s primal need, which is to keep eggs safe so the clan survives.  There is no time for anguish in an anthill.  Catastrophes happen.  They all have jobs to do and will deal with the casualties later.  

The chicken eggs we eat are a sideline of that survival imperative, but the desire to protect the nest has been bred out of domestic hens.  Humans are fine with eating the eggs of various birds and fish if they are collected at the right time, but ants’ eggs have never become a delicacy.  The Aztecs built their floating gardens in the shallow waters of a Mexican lake and cultivated worms and grubs for food, which are full of protein and readily available in the environment.  There are 500 species of insects in Mexico that are consumed as food.  In other parts of the world, people eat raw oysters but gag if given a worm.  They crunch on the crispy legs of a baby shrimp but turn their noses up at a pan-fried beetle.

 Creepy-crawlies surely bring bad things to humans, but the view that they should all be eliminated is willfully ignorant.  Billion-dollar industries have been created around killing bacteria, but as the anti-antibiotic lobby slogan says, ‘Not All Bugs Are Bad.’  The war on bacteria has created superbugs.  If we see an electron microscope image of the skin on our faces, we are confronted with the horrifying truth that there are insects and worms going about their business of clearing and consuming debris, while we talk, smile, and scratch ourselves. We don’t want to believe it, and try to erase the memory. If all bugs and bacteria are bad, then what will turn milk into cheese, or replace yeast fungus to make bread rise?  If we could see the viruses and bacteria around us, we might never leave their beds - oh wait, beds aren’t safe either.

Our blue planet is mostly salty seas, wind-scoured deserts, uninhabitable polar regions, and green fuzz where the prevailing winds drop precipitation.  The moss that grows on the wet and warm rocks of our planet is vegetable matter that becomes grasslands, jungles, and forests.  It is populated by fauna that scamper under its green canopy and range in size from elephants to insects. We humans are somewhere in the middle, closer to the smaller animals when we are born.  The earth has no plan, direction, or nature, except to remain suspended between its centrifugal pull and the sun’s gravity.  Humans, elephants, and ants don’t figure in this titanic standoff, but are only slithering creatures just below the blotchy green skin. Perhaps a pitiless killer has the same sense that neither he nor his victims will ever rise above the slime, so whether he takes his own life or the lives of others hardly matters to him.  Like the rest of us bugs, he’ll return to the organic ooze, and it won’t make any difference to the turning of the earth, only to the innocent’s grieving family.