Antagonism

The ants are back, with a vengeance, running all around the kitchen in what I sincerely hope is a kind of last hurrah before the cold weather starts. Last night I saw one running along the edge of the range with a large white crumb in its teeny little mandibles, and I felt roughly the sort of outrage you feel watching television coverage of some sort of civil unrest and seeing a youth run out of a looted department store with a television he clearly did not pay for. That's not your crumb, I thought, it's my crumb! Where are you going with my crumb? I don't want the crumb, I'd have thrown it out anyway, but it's just brazen of the ant to run away with it right in front of me.

So I got the insecticide and sprayed it along the doorway where they seemed to be coming in from outside, sprayed it with the heartless efficiency of a Prussian general ordering a wave of mustard-gas shells dropped onto the Allied lines. Destroy the enemy without mercy! I'm afraid that this long battle has transformed my view of ants—I've dehumanized them, you might say. War is like that.