Satire:
How
the Government Taught Me to Hate Ladybugs, and How Not
to Fight Them
As a child I
used to love finding ladybugs in the garden. These tiny
little beetles with the orange backs and black spots
were pretty and seemingly benevolent.
Last month,
however, everything changed forever. I came home to
thousands of insects swarming around my house. They had
slithered their way through cracks in my front door, and
had covered the inside walls of my home. It was not a
friendly visit, it was an inundation, an insurrection,
and a serious problem of immigration.
The culprits
were ladybug beetles: aggressive cousins to my former
childhood friends.
There were so
many that I expected them to begin spelling out demands
on the wall. But they made none. What they wanted
remained a mystery to me.
Where did they
come from? News reports confirmed that the Ohio State
Government had released thousands of the critters in an
effort to be “environmentally friendly.” In other
words, they had been created by the very government that
I was paying to protect me.
Thanks to the
Ohio State environmental bureaucrats, I now hated the
bugs with a passion. Once friendly acquaintances in the
world of nature were now set into eternal enmity. This,
I realized, was war. It was them or me.
My thoughts now
turned to tactics. Needing principles of dealing with
enemies, I surveyed US foreign policy for examples.
My first thought
was to spray the bugs with insecticide. But I realized
that spraying was simplistic and did not take account of
the complexities of the situation.
Military
doctrines followed in my lifetime did not support
spraying. First off, spraying was the use of
non-proportional force. Despite the mess in my
home, the constant crunching underfoot, the living
things in my hair and in my food, and the pervasive
threat of bites, the bugs had done nothing to me
equivalent to what the spray would do to them.
Furthermore,
most of them had shown no aggression towards me. The
majority would not bite. Shouldn’t I direct my force at
the very few who would threaten me? Why kill
innocents?
More questions
came to mind. Would I not be sinking to the level of
the beasts themselves in using such force? What would
be the response of other organisms to my actions? What
about “world opinion” in the realm of nature? This,
after all, mattered; one cannot “go it alone” in today’s
world.
Rather than
spraying, should I not rather try to understand why so
many otherwise decent bugs have followed a few
extremists into open hostilities against me? Why had
they come into my home to begin with? Were they not
simply looking for heat and for food? Perhaps my
possession of their needs of survival was bringing them
reluctantly into conflict with me. Possibly, I mused,
this was all my fault.
I felt that I
was on the verge of a breakthrough. The elements of a
policy were somehow emerging. There were no principles
I could use to understand a proper strategy, except the
principle of not acting with overwhelming force.
Cooperation, not violence, would be my motto. I knew
that this had not worked in the past, but it was a
different world back then. I had to change with the
times.
How do these
bugs get along with others, I asked, in a "pure"
environment, meaning one without my presence? Did they
not have natural enemies? There were millions of other
insects that might be willing to join forces with me.
Many of them were also threats to me, but this, I had
learned, was no reason not to enlist them in the present
limited engagement.
How about an
alliance with the wasps? I did not know if wasps were,
in fact, enemies of ladybugs, but this was no
impediment. After all, I realized that neither could I
tell which of the ladybugs were my enemies. To tell
friend from foe here, I felt, was not something I could
be certain of. All I could do was try it and see.
Bringing
thousands of stinging wasps into my home might seem to
be counterproductive, but I could deal with them in the
distant future, say next month. It was the present
threat I had to be concerned with.
My strategy was
clear. I had to act on a trial and error basis,
focusing at all times on the need to remain friends with
every animal except those few who show evidence of overt
aggression. I would not wage unlimited war, using
chemical weapons, against the ladybugs.
I would attack
them in three stages.
First, I would
expose my skin to them. I would stab those few who
attacked me with a pin, making certain not to harm the
others. I would make sure that the rest understood that
my attacks were not directed at them.
Second, I would
provide food and shelter for those that had not attacked
me yet. I could use the cash that I would have spent on
spray to buy insect food. I would promise the bugs
never to allow the temperature in the house to fall
below that required for their comfort and survival.
Third, I would
covertly bring several hundred hungry wasps into my home
and release them, promising them the resources they
would nee to build nests as a means to entice them to
attack my enemies.
The rules of
engagement would be (1) stab, (2) throw food, and (3)
let the wasps attack.
I knew I would
shortly be covered with stab wounds from killing
ladybugs on my body. I would have to buy food for my
enemies, as a matter of duty, since this was the only
way to prevent their turning against me also. I would be
in constant danger of attack by wasps. However, this
war, I told myself firmly, would be long. From this
point on, I would always wear protective clothing while
in my home, eat and sleep inside a mosquito-net
enclosure, and take security measures before walking
into dangerous rooms.
This strategy
would ensure me a solid “Homeland Defense.” Things
would never be the same inside my home, but, hey, it’s a
dangerous world.
Anybody know how
to fight wasps?
Home
John Lewis
classicalideals@yahoo.com
