Life As A Bug

A young woman stopped by my house just as the cat brought home a live mouse to play with.  My visitor commanded the cat to let the mouse go but the orders fell on deaf ears.  She chased the cat but it ran off with its catch to the far side of the courtyard. Flailing with a broom, she chased it until it slipped out of a gap in the wall, the mouse squeaking in the cat's mouth.  Half an hour later as my visitor was leaving, she stopped to admire a cactus flower.  As her nose honed in on the scent, she suddenly jerked her head back like she had been poked by a spine.  She pointed mutely to the flower as if it had bitten her, and we watched a black ant crawl out of the blossom.  She backed away from the pot, brushing down her blouse and stamping her feet because she had noticed a few ants around the bottom of the pot.  

“Eeew eeew get rid of them,” she shrieked.  

When I turned over a nearby boulder, she may have thought it was to smash the few ants we had seen, but under it, 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 given a wide berth to the scene of 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 pests,” I said.  “To some cats, the big ones,  humans are pests. We all have a place on the food chain.”

“I don’t get it,” she said, edging 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 head and I never saw her again.

 

Recently there has been 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, 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 paper tigers, which they attach to their enemies so they seem less human.  A Ukrainian general recently said about the Russians, “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 pre-existing 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 was an insect. Humans become bugs. If we are threatened by a tiger who sees us as prey, we can overlook his feline beauty, his value as a species, and kill him 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 delicacies.  There is a growing call against lobsters being boiled alive in case they feel pain.  Crayfish don’t fiddle any 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.  Catastrophe’s 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 ant’s 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 creepy crawlies 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, grasslands, jungles, and forests.  It is populated by fauna that scamper under the 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.  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.