Sometimes I kill the ants.
Most times I don't; I take the dog bowls outside and swipe the ants off into the grass. And maybe that traumatizes them, I don't know, maybe some of them die, but that is not my intent. I just want them off the bowls, out of the house. I do not mean to become the destroyer of ants.
But there are times I don't bother with this little pacifist ritual. Sometimes I plunge the dog bowls into hot water, drowning or scalding the ants. Sometimes the plastic bowl goes in the microwave, and ants get cooked. I don't pretend to feel bad for them. I do not consider if they feel horror or pain. There are always more ants. I don't always look where I step. No one condemns you for killing an ant.
Now, if you kill a lion and the Internet finds out, watch out. Especially if that lion has a name and a GPS collar and comes when he is called. You will be shamed--and maybe you should be. It is much harder and more expensive to kill a lion than an ant. To kill a lion you must first want to, and if you are a rich man in the middle of America you must pay what a lot of people consider an outrageous sum for the privilege. Money you could have given to charity or your alma mater. Money you could have donated to a library or a booster club.
When you kill a lion and the Internet finds out, you are subject to harsh judgment. Some people will seize the opportunity to be indignant, to advertise their elevated sensitivity. Some will troll you, do everything within their power from the comfort of their Aeron chairs by Herman Miller to ruin your life. Others will just be very sad that you felt moved to work so hard to be able to have your picture taken with a corpse.
But then there are others who will point out that most of us eat meat and most of us wear leather and what about the babies? For after all, it was just a lion, and a lion is a predator, and whether or not all the right papers were filed and the correct procedures followed, it was still just an animal that you greatly respected and honored in your heart. So good on you for offending the whiny liberals responsible for the wussification of America. That lion was probably a jerk, anyway. He maybe would have eaten one of those starving African babies that liberal Internet trolls don't care about.
I am not naive. It takes a willful and resolute ignorance to fail to perceive the harshness of the world and the everyday hypocrisies we embrace. We shrug off all the unseen cruelty that allows us our relative luxury. I know there are worse things to contemplate than the shooting of a lion in a far-off land.
But I still feel bad about the whole thing.
I think there is something sad about a person who is gratified by committing an act of violence. Part of this sadness derives from the reminder that people are capable of killing for esoteric reasons, from a safe remove, for some sort of exquisite, epicurean pleasure. It is a reminder that innocent things are not safe around us--we will go out of our way to break things and cause damage.
It's not a tragedy that the hitchhiking Canadian robot got trashed in Philadelphia eight days a go. (What was purported to be a surveillance video showing the destruction of HitchBOT turned out to be fake, and the pranksters who made the video deny they had any hand in destroying the whimsical social experiment, which was really vandalized.) It is disappointing that someone decided to smash up an object that had safely made it across Canada, Germany and the Netherlands two weeks into a journey that was supposed to take it across the U.S.
While a robot is not a sentient being and cannot feel pain, and HitchBOT wasn't even a particularly sophisticated piece of technology, it made no demands on anyone. People could participate in the project or let it be. I don't know that there was anything important that HitchBOT could "learn about humanity," but the idea behind the project was benign and sort of sweet. It made some people smile to think of a helpless piece of machinery being ferried across the country by good Samaritans. The only reason to smash it was to demonstrate your power over it.
Unlike some of the atrocities that have shown up on our screens lately, there's no way to rationalize these acts as mistakes committed by fallible humans acting out of fear. Cecil was killed because a dentist wanted a trophy. HitchBOT got smashed because he was designed to be defenseless.
Someone once defined evil as knowing better and doing worse. If so, we've probably all done evil things. The impulse to break something for an ugly jolt of adrenaline is probably universal. It's why we can't have nice things.
There's a lyric from a country song that has been running through my head for a couple of weeks now. It's the opening lines of the title track of Jason Isbell's Something More Than Free and it goes: When I get home from work, I'll call up all my friends/And we'll go bust up something beautiful, we'll have to build again.
I know exactly the feeling of exhaustion and release that Isbell means, the cathartic self-obliteration young men--and maybe old men too--sometimes seek in response to the dismal rhythms of everyday life. Part of growing up is fighting back these impulses. You don't always tell the boss what you think of her. You make your bed. You conform to the expectations that society holds for you, you silently endure their petty insults. You don't stomp on the ants.
Not always, anyway.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 08/09/2015