What’s bugging us?
Whether it’s a dog, a cat, or a boa constrictor, if you want to give your bored pet something to do, try letting a bug into your house. Most will go after it like a band of masked ICE agents tracking down a person who speaks with an accent like that of an undocumented migrant.
The feline who graciously allows me to cohabitate in his home gets upset not just with bugs in the house but also with bugs fluttering against patio doors. Smart as Zenger might seem, he hasn’t quite understood the concept of glass serving as our wall against border invasion.
This weekend, while the door was open so I could bring in groceries, a wasp managed to sneak across the border, possibly in search of greater opportunity in the land of the freely heated.
After several minutes of demonstrating that he has a vertical leap that might lead Bill Self to give him a million-dollar name-image-and-likeness contract, Zenger came remarkably close to proving his skills as an insect-hunting ICE agent.
Learning that some migrant insects are armed with stingers was a lesson I thought could safely be excluded from Zenger’s educational curriculum, so I went in search of a flyswatter. What I found was an old one picked up on a trip many years ago. A vestige of times gone by, It was clearly stamped “Holiday Inn.”
Holiday Inns may not be the palatial retreats they once were, but I suspect modern travelers would be more in search of refunds than branded flyswatters if they found bugs in their overpriced accommodations.
Times obviously have changed. When supposedly ritzy motels were giving out flyswatters, we were a nation in which nearly everyone had a common frame of reference.
We read the same newspapers. We listened to the same network newscasts. People felt out of it if they hadn’t read the Record or the Eagle. They watched Walter Cronkite not because they thought he was their uncle but so they could know what everyone else knew and maybe — just maybe — work together with others to fix whatever needed fixing.
Nowadays, if we try to engage in productive dialogue, we might as well be speaking different languages. Look at any comment thread on social media. Everyone’s talking; no one’s listening — in part because they don’t share a common ground of fact but instead stand on shifting sand spun dozens of different ways to pander to their preconceptions.
As it turns out, flyswatters haven’t been replaced by bug zappers. They still have an important role to play. Maybe the same might be said for having an informational common ground on which society can build rather than shifting sands into which it sinks.
— ERIC MEYER