The ants showed up in our kitchen one day. From under the floor, they crawled up and helped themselves to our crumbs.
“Our” crumbs? I include the ants in that collective pronoun.
Were these ants newcomers? Travelers? Or had they been here all along, dormant for whatever reason beneath the tiles, between the tiles and whatever is between the tiles and the Earth, perhaps “in that quiet Earth?”
I don’t like killing ants. Neither does my wife. But these were tiny things, so easily squishable, and there was nothing else to do with them unless we allowed them an unhindered run of the place.
The Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, shows domestic scenes of Indian life I’ll always remember because of their radical difference from American domestic life. I remember a scene of a house with an interior courtyard. Pigeons nested near the roof, and flew back and forth, and walked around the house. I’d never seen anything like that.
In my experience, any alien life in a house– a spider, a fly, an ant– is unwelcome and alarming. Not accepted or tolerated.
Between inside the house and the outdoors should be an unpassable line. Humans inside, everything else– out.
But these ants in the kitchen– who could say how long they had been on the property? Is there any expanse of property that does not have ants? If they had been on the property all along, who were we to say that we were committed to their final annihilation simply because we didn’t want them in “our” house?
We found that mint deters them, so we put some around the places they emerged. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen any inside.
States have that in common with houses. The political powers of a state will claim the property, and define who belongs, and who doesn’t.
A common story of the last century is about how the indigenous people of some place were inconvenient and undesirable to another people, who had the advantages of wealth and military power. The stronger group would try to wipe out the weaker. That would be the end of that.
Time and again, a military defeat of indigenous people proved impossible in Ireland, India, Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan– anywhere and everywhere.
In the US, the native peoples were confined to sorely inadequate reservations, to the ongoing detriment of the natives and to the everlasting shame of the people who put them there and the people who continue to perpetuate the neglect of their rights and deny them the resources they need.
In Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank– more places than not– people are singled out, isolated, and mistreated because they are somehow out of step with the majority, or the powers that be, who separate citizens into first-class and second-class citizens.
There is no first-class citizen, or nationality, that is made so because it has relegated other people to second-class status.
There are no military solutions to the social problems that come with the governance of a diverse population.
Where people historically live, where they are born and die, it’s arbitrary politics to say they don’t have the right to be there.
A military solution is never a definitive, ideal solution. Not even with an ant.