The Choices We Make
are the murders we commit
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After a tick crawls up your leg or into your hair, you capture it between your finger and thumb, set it down on a hard surface and cut it in half with your fingernail. Death to all ticks.
Yet today I freed a catbird caught in the blueberry nets. I couldn’t just let it hang there to die, crying out with its annoying “meow.” I disentangled it, then carefully placed it out of sight of the dog. Freedom for the catbird.
Daddy long leg spiders? Live. Wolf spiders? Die. Mice? Live until they get into the house, then die. Mosquitoes? Die. Roaches? Die! Then call the exterminator so that all future generations of roaches die. (I once took a bath with two large roaches when they crawled out of the overflow drain and plopped into my suds. Never again.)
The same goes for plants that make the mistake of growing in the wrong place. Queen Anne’s Lace or thistle in the garden? Yanked out without hesitation. Left to die, roots drying in the sun. Poison ivy or wild parsnip on the trails? Flailed and mulched until they give up all hope and die. Prairie flowers and grasses? Live here. Die elsewhere. They’re listed as weeds on the label of the herbicides the industrial farmer down the road uses.
I get to play God at Draco Hill. But then, doesn’t everyone? We make choices every day. When we create a farm or a family, when we build a house, a business or a life, we decide at every step what stays and what goes. When we engineer our environment or our society, we do the same. The choices we make reflect our values and our vision of the future. They also create winners and losers.
I take my cues from the SCOTUS and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds. What used to be a normal, healthy ecosystem just minding its own business (like, I don’t know, conversations between a woman and her doctor), suddenly has a new God imposing itself on it. Women who breed on their own terms are now the greatest pests of all. They’re like flies in the kitchen, spitting all over the meat and potatoes.
This God has determined that a few cells emitting an electrical pulse are more worthy of life than a sentient human being. Women will die in childbirth, starve in poverty or get beaten to death for getting pregnant in the first place, their entire lives silently drying in the sun. And in Iowa, the law does not define “woman,” so Kim Reynolds’ edict applies to 9-year-olds who’ve been raped and try to hide it as much as to 45-year-olds who thought they could no longer get pregnant.
I choose birds over ticks, coneflowers over Queen Anne’s Lace and tomatoes over thistle every day. I get to choose because I have the power to do so. The losers don’t know why. They can’t even ask. They just suffer and die as a result of my choices.
Nothing will change for them until they have the power to change it. As Frederick Douglass once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” Fortunately for my weeds and pests, I’ll die before their ecosystem does. My sense of what’s right and wrong will die with me.
Perhaps then they will crawl, fly and grow wild and free, soaking up the sun and water, making their own rules and living by their own code. Or maybe some conservationist will come along with a backpack full of Round Up and righteously maintain my murderous ways in the name of saving the planet.
Truth is, someone’s always going to be the pest. Something’s always going to be a weed.
Somebody always pays the price.
Friday night at Draco Hill is Bug Night! Come see all the insects you can stand, drawn by Jim Durbin’s bug lights. He’ll talk to us what we’re seeing and we’ll have a nice evening outside. Learn more and sign up at Draco Hill Nature Farm.