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writing for godot

Ant Wars

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Written by Billy Bob   
Tuesday, 05 June 2012 01:23

How many trillions of ants have been killed in ant wars instigated or perpetrated by human children who were just playing? How many have been lost to magnifying glasses alone? I myself probably killed a hundred or more by this method when I was a kid. When we were kids we gathered the most destructive and aggressive acting ants in our neighborhood to be crammed together in a pickle jar with the express purpose of instigating a war. We were sophisticated enough to realize that we could egg on their natural aggression by digging deep and gathering as many pupae as possible, specifically targeting colonies with visible pupae and intentionally instigating them first. As ant manipulators, we came out virtually unscathed after aggressively conquering these colonies and pitting them against each other. However, our own objectives weren’t political, although I imagine we did feel a sense of power and superiority from this act. Our only serious goal was to entertain ourselves. We even waged bets on the outcome. Some of us profited while they died in the thousands. It became quite a spectator sport among our Little-Rascals-aged gang of kids with an entire Summer of time on our hands.

Soon, we were “inventing” newer and newer methods of killing them in ways “never thought of before” and beyond the old classic of just burning them alive while they walked through the beam of a magnifying lens. Just like simultaneously parallel inventions of kids across the country, we “invented” the use of gun powder in the forms of firecrackers and cap gun caps. If you wanted a bigger miniature explosion, you could combine together the powder from several surgically emptied cap gun caps, but you had to be careful. You could burn your fingers and hurt for a few days afterward if you weren’t.

This was the rural Midwest, so naturally, real guns were not far away. One of my older brothers played a prank on me that went quite a bit too far. He was old enough to hunt although I was only five. He shot his shotgun out his bedroom window while another brother poured ketchup on his own t-shirt. The ketchup brother played dead. This was initially “funny” because I came into the room and took the whole thing seriously. Not only had they gone much much too far, but they soon realized it from my reaction. I don’t remember the event, but it and the scare they all got from the way I reacted became part of our family lore. A neighborhood kid wasn’t so lucky. He got hold of some of his dad’s shotgun shells and a hammer and blew part of his knee completely off in the safety of his own garage. This wasn’t gun safety gone awry. This was “gun safety” splatting against the wall of real world applications. We were aware of the news. We were aware of, what my mom called, “shoot ‘em up bang” movies. We were aware of the whole war hero propaganda that was directly marketed at our age group. We were aware of the local popularity of hunting. Shootin’ stuff and pretending to shoot stuff was ingrained into us.

Eventually some of the older kids took interest in our ant wars. I remember one Saturday evening when a few of them got a huge jar so we could witness the whole thing from every angle. Two of the ants earned a lot of respect by going at it for about an hour. Eventually, the loser was dismembered.

It’s not that we weren’t the ants ourselves at times. We used to have what we called “dirt-clod wars”. These were basically highly elaborate snowball fights, but which occurred in the Summer and involved, you guessed it. The trouble is, they would always escalate beyond control and someone would introduce clods with pebbles in them. By the time we were done, it was basically rock throwing. These wars were elevated to the next level in our neighborhood when a new house was going up but hadn’t gotten past the foundation stage. They dug a perfect hole for trench warfare and didn’t fill it for a long time. We filled it with war fantasies and Evel Knievel bike ramp injuries. I remember one minor dirt clod skirmish that ended when another kid kept getting the better of me with pebble after pebble. I finally went nuclear and just threw a brick. It hit him square in the face. Luckily, he wasn’t injured, but he cried and I temporarily justified it thinking that all of those pebbles somehow equalled one brick. Of course my justification was a facade. He had been the first to escalate the war to the point where it no longer felt like a game, but inside, I knew I had gone too far. I also knew that if I had followed through with my throw he likely would have been seriously hurt. Half-way through my delivery, I eased up a bit, suddenly realizing how dangerous my anger had become. I even cringed when the brick hit its originally intended target. If my weapon of revenge had been a more affective and automatic one, I wouldn’t have been able to slow down that momentum. The full force would have been released without the necessity of much exertion, or even conscientious intention, on my part.

Naturally, the fantasy wars we engaged in extended to the school yard as well. We invented gangs we called “armies”. When we weren’t arguing over who’s ass would get kicked between Superman and Dracula, or Godzilla and some other kid’s dad, we were acting out more war fantasies. I was a big kid, so I became a self-appointed general. My army: “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, was the terror of the 2nd grade. It even patrolled the schoolyard, a la Zimmerman, and provided mafia-styled protection services for kids who had been victimized by the 5th grade. That’s right, we re-bullied an older class. One of our victims had bullied several of us until we cornered him in a poorly monitored section of the playground. We push/tripped him into the chain-link cyclone fence. He needed several stitches all over his cheeks. We were hated after that and I truly hated myself for what I had done. Naturally, I orchestrated the whole thing and pushed him myself. The pride of pushing back a bigger kid vanished almost instantly when I saw him bleeding and crying. I was only in the 2nd grade, but it did grow me up a little and pretty quickly.

Like in our “wars”, more traditional games never fully resolved. No one ever enjoyed the satisfaction of working together to a victory. Sportsmanship simply wasn’t part of our makeup. By the time it was over, the respective teams always seemed to degenerate into one of two factions: the “quitters” vs. the “cheaters”.

In fact, frequently these games degenerated into yet more full-scale wars, at least with the weapons we had available to us. These weapons might have been fists, or more rocks, but in the heat of battle we often seemed to lose all perspective, so any other weapon might have been experimented with had it been within reach at the time. If we had been raised more carelessly or had been left unmonitored, perhaps things could have gotten so far out of hand that I wouldn’t be relating this story today. It wasn’t that our aggression was unique. We were annoying little kids trying hard to be “tough” and trying hard not to be “wusses”. However, our aggression was always kept in check, if for no other reason than by the simple fact that deadly force just wasn’t easily accessible. If it had been, there could have been unintended consequences. The fact is, I could have killed that kid with that brick alone. Luckily I didn’t. If I had, at about 6 or 7 years old, I don’t think I would have been tried as an adult, even in today’s political atmosphere. Still, I’d have ended someone else’s life, even though I had no remote concept of that as a possibility. Imagine the shock I would have endured and inflicted on others if, this time, the ketchup stain wasn’t ketchup at all, but was the real thing and we weren’t just play acting an inappropriate fantasy. Luckily, we grew up in a neighborhood basically like those portrayed on ‘60s sitcoms. We grew up with the knowledge that it was still possible to walk away. Unfortunately, there are parts of the world where, if a young boy chooses to do that, he might as well be fitted for a skirt and a giant bulls-eye in the middle of his back from then on. In that environment, the only way for a fight or a “war” to resolve itself is with the complete physical defeat and humiliation of one side, who is only capable of saving face by taking his punishment. In that situation, any non-use of an available weapon would be seen as cowardice. In those parts of the same planet we all supposedly inhabit, any pulling back from a total commitment to annihilation is an unforgivable act.

There were other ways these childhood cruelty fantasies went too far. When I got a little older I remember another, still young, popular school kid bragging about all the neighborhood frogs he’d personally sacrificed to his pet piranha. It wasn’t just that. Afterall, even piranhas gotta eat, right? No, it was the festivity of it that, even in my own cruel-hearted youth (perhaps now tempered by previous experience) seemed immoral to me. He invited friends over to watch and laugh at the hilarity of the frog trying to swim away with fewer and fewer limbs until floating limp and disemboweled to be finished off at the piranha’s convenience. No one ever bothered to empathize with the frog. Until real life smacks us in the head, people generally don’t. The kids who enjoyed the spectacle of the sacrifice all just assumed they had more in common with the aggressor.

What if privilege, luck or other circumstances prevent real life from ever giving you your fair share of smacks the face? How much sympathy do you have for others when your own childhood experience was just like that of the piranha? I believe that, if that educational smack in the face happens too late in life it doesn’t have the same impact. By then, you’re an adult and perhaps capable of treading water anyway. You’ve already grown accustomed to the idea that no one owes you any tears. This time you lost, but afterall, you’ve won so so many times in the past that it hardly matters. When the smack in the face happens, and you’re still a child, it’s a whole other ball game. In fact suddenly, it’s not a game at all. It can scar you, or hopefully, it can turn you into a compassionate person. At any rate, it seems to be a pre-requisite to actually growing up. Without it, there’s simply no incentive and it probably never will happen. Which is just fine, if you live a life of padded luxury where it’s completely unnecessary. However when you become an adult, the fact that it never happened to you is unfortunate for the rest of us caught in the beam of your magnifying lens.

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