Let's Talk About... Ants!
You know? Ants are practically everywhere! They are very industrious: They can lift twenty times their body weight! They are organized. They are smart. Aesop wrote about them: Remember the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? The ant works for the future, the grasshopper lives for today? The ant is prepared for the horrible season to come. Not so the grasshopper! (On the other hand, the ant has had no fun in its short life, but at least the grasshopper did. So think carefully about this fable before you go off half-cocked: The moral could be more complex than you thought).
But I’m afraid I’ve lead you down the garden path: I’m not really going to talk about Ants. What I want to talk about is War.
Homo sapiens have been around since at least a half million years ago. The ants we know today go back at least 60 million years. But with the exception of us and ants there are no species that try to kill each other off en masse, and these killings are properly classified as war. But we humans alone invented Non-war Mass Murder like mass shootings Murder alone isn’t good enough for us, we need Mass Murder: Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and those kids at Columbine and that guy in Las Vegas.
You know? If you study history, war and death are written about more frequently than peace and love. (Because you can’t count rapes in war as love, okay?) Our species has a morbid fascination about violent death. It’s in our history, our literature, our movies, our video games. Jesus fucking christ, what are we so titillated about? I don’t know… I’m talking about ants here, remember??
I don’t think there is any evidence of a one singular ant deciding to kill another ant because it wanted to make off with a piece of grain in order to impress the Queen. But I do know (because I’ve seen it on the Internet and so it must be true) that if you have a jar full of red and black ants altogether, they just lie there peacefully. But if you shake them up, they start shredding each other. (MAGA: Make Ants Grate Antagonists)
The thing is: War is really easy to talk about, but it’s really difficult to live through. Since the Civil War, the United States has not had to live through any great domestic destruction due to war. Okay, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, once each, localized, and we freaked out about them. However, if you have war happening to you practically every day, everywhere around you, only then will you know what War is really like. General William T. Sherman once said “War is hell.” And he was right.
(Sherman never said “Ants can be a real pain in the ass at picnics,” but he might have thought it. Perhaps ants like to annoy us as payback for those boys who attempt to make them explode with a magnifying glass. Sick little bastards. But I digress.)
At present, Ukraine knows what war is. And Gaza knows what war is. There are also several other places that know what war is too, but we don’t count them because we are so blasé about war and they’re not interesting enough to be covered by the 24-hour news channels. So Americans don’t know what “war” is: Vietnam was completely over our heads, and so was Iraq, and so was Afghanistan. But you can bet that if some ants went to war with other ants, both ant colonies would be tuned in. And they don’t even have cable tv.
I think what I’m saying about war is you can’t really talk about War with knowledge unless you’ve lived through it. So the smart thing to do is to repudiate it entirely without personally going through all the death and destruction. But if you think you want to live through it, or have lived through it and still think it’s cool, the United States used to have “colonies” (you know, like ants) where you could be put and where you can weave all your basket dreams of war. We need to bring these places back.
“War sucks.” <This should go without saying.
“War needs to be stopped.” <And I’ve just written the most fatuous line in the English Language. And in the Ant Language as well. But we’re not going to pay attention to it because we are human. And the ants won’t pay attention either because they’re not on Facebook®.
