Being Bugged

           

We can’t live without them. Some, we can’t live with at all. They constitute ninety five percent of the earth’s living organisms. I mean bugs. They’re everywhere. Shore dwellers are painfully aware of that.

           

 Bacteria are often referred to as bugs – they’re not - but if I did include them as bugs and could stack both up like pennies, they would extend a trillion light-years into space. In short, we Homo sapiens are a tiny minority on this planet.  Considering we’re just a handful, we’ve way overestimated our importance.

           

From Biblical times, human kind, now some seven billion of us, has regarded itself – and particularly its males - as the glory of God’s creation; a little lower than the angels but above women and well above bugs. Some say it’s the gift of our thumbs and our self-reflexive capacities and certain body parts that’s given us first class status on the planet but I question this.  God did not impart thumbs, consciousness and select body parts to us for status. They’re assigned for function.  I think we’re wired to be co-creators with God. Whether by inventing wheels or computers or giving birth we practice our divine attributes and become co-creators.  Our self-reflexive abilities allow us to wonder at nature’s majesty, even to weep at sunsets, and also to have compassion.

           

I think we’ve used our divine attributes poorly.

Almost worldwide, and for eons women have been regarded as a minority, not because of numbers, but for the access to opportunities men have denied them. African-Americans have been a numerical minority here but like women, have had opportunities denied them by a majority.  It’s really a guy thing that blacks and women have been a minority for so long. Possessing status and power as men have for so long is like having a drug habit; you never have enough and you’ll do anything to get more.

Majorities and minorities are especially hot topics today.  In the year 2043, Asians and Hispanics are predicted to exceed the white population. Some whites are nervous about this since they know how they once treated minorities.

Minorities, however, may act as oppressively as majorities. Scientists believe that our human activity is responsible for the extinction of an increasing number of earth’s species, including bugs.  In politics our federal government was partially shut down for seventeen days by a small minority called the Tea Party.  This bugged both Democrats and Republicans alike.

A close look at bugs, ants and bees is instructive. Majority groups like these act wisely. They work for the good of all. Yes, their queens do enjoy incredible power and status. However, what defines these groups is cooperation, using everyone’s gifts for the common good.

Best we learn, not from those bugs making spectacular demonstrations by their sheer numbers, like swarms of locusts that waste everything in their wake, but those insects, like bees, that hum along in quiet cooperation, like the world’s peacemakers do. They work night and day, seeking cooperative solutions.  Like so many bugs, we rarely see them at work.