It's a Bug's Life...and Mine

I’ve been totally engaged with pests lately, and I don’t mean the Bernie or Bust ones you find online. It began with a gnat-like creature that suddenly appeared in our kitchen and entertainment room area a few weeks ago and turned eating and TV watching into a tropical jungle-like experience. They even drove us out of the house for the day…but don’t cry for us, Argentina…or Italy…or New England, or wherever our friends may be. We spent the day with my brother and his wife who treated us to fine wine and bug free food while we waited for the chemicals to do their dirty work back at the house. But then came the semi-regular rodent invasion. A few years ago I put in some of those electric devices that are supposed to repel the mice with sound waves. They’ve done such a great job that I have about a dozen un-sprung mouse traps in the upper large attic and the mice have moved down into the space between the first and second floors where I can neither install traps nor ultrasonic and simply have to wait until they birth their springtime babies and move out into the great outdoors and hopefully into the waiting mouths of the neighborhood gopher snakes.
A few days ago these pesky annoyances took an intolerable turn, however, when honeybees commandeered the deep end of my swimming pool. They found a crevice in the grout between the tiles and moved in…lock, stock, drones, queen and honeycomb. They had conducted a similar occupation two years ago in the spa, and I repeated the same (ahem) remedy this time by sealing the crevice with silicone. The next day, I found a swarm of them trying to dig their way back in…depending upon your degree of anthropomorphism, either to get back home or to rescue their comrades. The day after that, I found dozens of bee bodies floating dead in the pool and impressions of bee bodies embedded in the sealant, reminding me a bit too much of the human impressions created by the volcanic ash in Pompeii. Don’t think I wasn’t a little haunted by the results of my action…and because I spent a good deal of time in a seminary where we routinely pondered such matters of high moral consequence, I wondered how much of a difference there was between my entombing countless bees in the concrete of my pool and Donald Blankenship, whose greed and negligence was responsible for burying alive 29 miners in his Upper Branch Mine six years ago.
Such was the severity of my moral conflict that when I finally was able to resume the use of my pool, I couldn’t take my eyes off the bug pictured here, which was on its back, kicking its legs and fluttering its wings in a vain attempt to stop from drowning. I swam four laps by it until the old Catholic guilt rose up again inside me and I decided to save it. I had no idea what kind of bug it was. For all I knew it could be carrying the Zika virus, and I would be responsible for spreading the scourge through San Diego County. As I studied the bug’s struggle to get its breath back and clear its little lungs of chlorine and muriatic acid, I wondered what about it moved me to such a deed. It wasn’t just the shame over what I had done to the bees because surely if it had been a spider on its back gasping for life, it’s unlikely I would’ve noticed let alone acted. Could it have been its size or brilliant green color that inspired me? I don’t think so. I can imagine large, green bugs that I would’ve let drown without a second thought. Then when I looked at it lying on the concrete close enough to take pictures of it, I realized what it was…it looked almost human. As it had been in the water, it desperately kicked its legs and arms, as I imagine a human might do in a similar predicament.

This reopened a question I’ve asked in The Nob before: what is it that arouses our sympathies for some creatures and not others. As happened, this moral dilemma of mine was playing out just around the time we were experiencing a national outrage over the killing of Harambe, the gorilla, after a child had fallen into its keep at a zoo. Folks were in high dudgeon about the alleged negligence of the parents and about the allegedly trigger happy animal control agents who seemed to cavalierly eschew the use of tranquilizers in rescuing the child. Not to say that those aren’t juicy topics for Internet debate where emotions generally trump fact and reason, but they aren’t my topic. Mine is this: would the outrage have been the same if the kid had fallen into a viper's pit or crocodile's or a mongoose's? More over, would any of those creatures even have been given a name like Harambe was? And is the same dynamic in play here as when the crash of a passenger jet with 300 Americans onboard elicits more anguish from us than a crash of 300 foreigners?       
Is it simple human nature to have more sympathy with those we can identify with?  Easier to identify with a gorilla than a python? Easier to cry for dead Americans than dead Egyptians? If that is so, then we must admit that some lives matter more than others. And then we have to ask, does that matter? Does it matter that we value some lives more than others?
It seems to matter immensely. It matters when it comes to determining what lives we’re going to use our chemicals, our guns, and our indifference against. It matters when it comes to deciding which lives we’re going to save, improve, and protect. It’s not only a political dodge to claim that all lives matter, it’s an outright lie to say it. As a species, we prove it’s a lie in billions of decisions we make every day.  This week I decided that the life of an anonymous green bug was more important to me than the lives of untold honeybees. And I also decided to spend a good deal of time contemplating that because I could…and because I should.


Reborn and on the run...