I’m a bad, bad Buddhist, Mr. Fire Ant

Well, actually, I’ve never claimed to be a good one, but the moral precept against killing would definitely stop me from reaching an enlightened state. Chalk it up to fire ants.

Actually out the four big ones (killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct) I’d probably fail on the last too, but that’s a subject for a different blog.

But fire ants, by Buddha, deserved to be eradicated from the face of the Earth! If you’re lucky enough never to have encountered them, take it from me they are the nastiest little critters on the planet. They are the seeds of sci-fi horror movies. Left to live, they will take over your yard, your house too, maybe kill your horse, and all the beneficial insects in the local environment, including all other ant species

First a flashback. When I was about 12 or so, I saw Naked Jungle, with Charlie Heston (I’ve seen so many of his b-movies including Omega man, that the dead actor and I are on first-name basis.) Charlie is a lonely South American plantation owner who forgoes all the courting and romance and orders a mail order bride from New Orleans. She’s a good girl though, maybe that’s the problem (cough, cough) but the first half of the movie is about, from what I can gather, what an a-hole Charlie’s character is.

Then come the commie ant hordes, and we escape all these complicated human emotions and get right down to war. It’s a great war too, with Charlie making heroic efforts not just to save his plantation from ants who are stripping all vegetation bare and eating his cattle down to bare bones before they can so much as go “mooo?”, but Charlie sacrifices himself to save his indentured servants, including his mail-order bride.

Now back to fire ants, think Naked Jungle in slow mo. Or stop motion. Worse in a way. The ants (Army ants) in Charlie’s movie sting at first crawl. Fire ants will wait until a hundred or so of their sisters are on you, then they’ll all sting at once. Sort of like a Blitzkrieg, the little nazis. (Okay, I also alluded to them as commies, but that was the ants in Charlie’s cold war era movie. Fire ants are more like some sort of entrenched hate group. Or, in the spirit of this blog, a zombie horde, mindlessly shuffling along, devouring all in their path.)

I keep thinking of the image of Buddha touching the Earth with one finger in affirmation of life and the middle way. I wonder if he would have been able to reach that point if he’d been sitting on a fire ant colony. Probably so, but then he was a bodhisattva, and obviously, I’m not. Now pardon me while I go to the hardware store to get some baited poison for my little friends.