(5 minute read)
Buggy
The title refers to the aftermath of a comment a person made regarding bugs. In a closed group that I belong to the admin posted a beautiful picture of a carpenter bee. Things got ugly. Fast!
(Whoa and stop right there buddy! Yes, I know a bee is an insect.[i] But I really wanted to go with a bug derived sub-heading. Bugging out. Getting’ buggy with it. You’re bugging me. Don’t bug on me. Well, you get the drift.)
It truly was a stunning picture. A woman posted in the comments section that she happened to hate carpenter bees because they did so much damage to her home. Not a problem so far. Then she added that she took great delight in shoving a wire into the hole that they made in order to kill them. A bridge too far.[ii]
The lefties struck.
Not pretty
In my life I have been accused of being left wing, right wing, liberal, conservative, anti-union, communist, and I’ll just stop there because the spectrum covered is deep, varied and descends into the vulgar. If you think of it—I’ve probably been called it. I like to think that I have evolved. Now, in regard to the comment that the woman bee killer made.
A person commented that she made a “repugnant” comment. Another called her evil. (To date I have not yet specifically been called repugnant.) Another commenter said that she was an evil person. There was more name calling and retorts. One person said that in regard to getting rid of bugs that they didn’t do “catch and release.” Alternative methods for carpenter bee killing were offered. Lines in the sand were drawn.
I briefly entered the fray when I posted that when we had sold our home we had to pay a pest exterminator to treat some of our out building that had been attacked by carpenter bees and that we didn’t have time to get the bees into a witness protection program. Now, I thought that was kind of funny.
Apparently, I was wrong.
Necessary evil
The person that commented to my comment about using pest control to kill the bees out of necessity said that a necessary evil was still evil. Keep in mind that we’re still talking about bugs/insects. I don’t believe that the off-hand comment that the woman made about enjoying killing bees rose to the level of serial killer evil even though she was called a murderer and did murder more than one bee. She did mention to her detractors that she also ate meat and wore leather. She knew her adversaries.
A couple of decades ago when I was a dissident union member, I wrote a newsletter dealing with all the various issues that we faced in dealing with the union and corporations across America. (Does ‘across this great land of ours’ sound more patriotic than just saying America? I thought so. Let’s pretend I wrote that instead.) I happened to write about a struggle that a union local was engaged with against Caterpillar Corp. I copied the phrase that the local used and said that they were trying to “Kick the Cat” and had a picture of a cat arching its back.
A woman from PETA called.[iii]
Plinking
Okay, she didn’t really call. She emailed me. As it turned out the woman really objected to my writing ‘kick the cat.” She objected lots. She felt strongly about it. Telling her that I wasn’t actually encouraging animal abuse didn’t really make any headway with her. She was giving no quarter in our back forth emailing. My fingers were flying on the keyboard. Two fingers. One on each hand. That’s the way I roll or rather type. Quite the image, isn’t it? We were texting and it hadn’t even been invented yet. I finally emailed to her that I needed to break from our conversation for a couple of minutes to do something and would be right back.
I gave it a couple of minutes and then emailed her that I was back. There was an email waiting before I finished typing. She obviously took typing in school. Smart people knew to do that. In my response back that I was already working on after telling her to wait I told her that in order to deal with getting so worked up in dealing with her stupidity I went out and plinked a sparrow off our back porch. It worked so well that I was going to keep doing it after every time she said something stupid. Naturally she texted back, “What?” So, I wrote that plinking meant shot and that meant that I had shot a sparrow and had just got another one.
Never heard from her again.
Note: No actual plinking was involved. Not the best story about me is it? We all have warts. Some of us more than others.
Throwing down
People are locked and loaded on social media. They are ready to engage. It’s engagement without repercussions. Conversations can quickly metamorphosize into other less benign territory even over the picture of a bee. No one was personally threatened with violence in the bee throwdown. The subject matter wasn’t quite that intense. But threats are being made out there. Threats are being carried out.
Whether I am at a left- or right-wing site I’ll check out the comments. I check out what is being said at neutral sites as well including political and non-political. Lots of threats. Lots of name calling. An appalling amount of misinformation being passed as gospel. But the preponderance of intimidation and violence being threatened is coming from the right, along with talk of insurrection (overthrowing the government) and a general mistrust of our form of government. Throughout all the hate speech runs the thread of the nation being immoral and needing to get back to Christianity
or else!
Moral of the story.
All things considered what really happened was that a guy posted a beautiful closeup picture of a carpenter bee. If you decide to post a comment.
Bee careful.