My existential guilt

On Sunday, I helped Mom plant tulips in the side garden to our house. In the process, we initiated what I shall term “The Massacre of the Bees” which shall forever live on in infamy in the history of Yen. Or perhaps we have now created a whole generation of jihadist bees who hate the Yens because of our merciless destruction of their homes due to our whim of making a ‘prettier” garden. Before my imagination gets too carried away, let me just report the facts as is. So we were pulling out mints and weeds to clear the way for the tulips and we discovered a hole where lots of bee traffic was going on. My mom surmised that a hive was perhaps in the hole and contemplated what we should do about it. Live and let live was not q uite considered as a viable option. Because we didn’t have any insecticides at hand, my mom decided to take a pot of boiling water and drench the hole with angry hot water. The poor bees! I have to admit that I felt great existential guilt as a human being at that point, with our willful destruction of innocent lives. Then some bees that were busy foraging try to come back into their homes but alas, they founded ruinous destruction everywhere. While they flew around, wringing their antenna in despair, my dad joined in to produce further carnage by taking an electric fly swatter and literally electrocuting to death the hapless surviving few. How it works is like this. It’s a like a modified tennis racket, except the strings are all wires, designed to deliver a swift jolt of current to the poor insect body that flies in contact with the racket surface. Upon contact, you hear a pop and a sizzle and then sometimes, a thin wreath of smoke arises from the charboiled body. It’s a very cruel instrument of death, from the perspective of a fly, or a bee, in this case. One by one, the fried bees fell wordlessly into the dirt below to join their brethen who were underground and perhaps already drowned. I don’t know why, but I felt guilty and sad that humans and bees cannot live harmoniously and that we had to do this to them.

Earlier before, I had a similar experience at the grocery store where the seafood people pulled out these lobsters from their tanks and the lobsters were just going buck wild, squirming, twisting, curling and uncurling its tails, spraying water everywhere. It made me sad to think that very soon these lobsters will be placed in huge pots and literally steamed to death. Perhaps its because I try to imagine how it would be if I were placed in a pot and steamed to death. No sir, I would not like that one bit. So therefore, my sympathy went out to the lobsters and I felt a flash of shame for myself as a member of such a predatory species. Still, it is fair to say that this guilt has not stopped me from enjoying my lobster dinner the night before that, at the Tower Oaks Lodge. Perhaps the sooner I accept the fact that as a human, as a carnivore, I will have to sacrifice living animals for my own sustenance, the better it would be for me. It’s not often that I have to confront the actual killing of an animal, but everyday, my very existence means the death of these poor things. Hard to reconcile sometimes. And I guess, it also makes our destruction of the beehive seem more inexcusable because we aren’t killing them out of necessity, only out of a desire for convenience and to avoid being stung.