Friday, July 31, 2009

What's the difference between a piss-ant, a psocid and us?

We were lying on our backs in a too-big bed (it was a king, we are comfortable in a double), the window AC was on (it was 90+ outside and the bedroom was upstairs) and rattling nosily. The house, a weekly rental in the Keys, was pretty well infested with piss-ants. You know them. Tiny ants that never seem to cause trouble but annoy by being there. So there we were, looking at the ceiling when she said "are those piss-ants up there?" Sure enough. They were crawling upside down on the cove molding going from one corner across the room to another and then disappearing. Hundreds of them. Both directions. Moving very fast. What the hell were they doing? No idea. When they met on the road they paused and touched then ran on. Occasionally one stopped for a few seconds, turned around and took off the way it had come.
I thought of a big city seen from above. Are we just piss-ants? Well, piss-ants don't think of themselves as piss-ants. If they think at all they consider themselves to be Very Important Ants. Bustling off to work. Keeping home and hearth together. Serving the greater good by being a cog in an immense machine. Are we just piss-ants? Well, we don't think so do we? But a lot of us think of ourselves as just trying to keep home and hearth together. Serving the greater good by being a cog in a vast machine. Hmmmm.
Now psocids. Even smaller insects. They infest almost everything sooner or later almost everywhere. We don't like them because we find them in our stored food and on our books. Are we just psocids of the world writ large? Not really. They do little harm (yes they eat paper and other things that we cherish, but they eat so very little that it takes a really long time to notice the missing glue or paper or cereal). The same cannot be said for us. I remember a line from an old movie where the rain forest aboriginal people's name for white people was "termite". They lived for Milena in harmony with their land, and whites came in with chainsaws and destroyed everything.Piss-ants and psocids are innocent of intent to destroy. That's the difference.

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