ANTS IN MY PANTS

I've always loved and admired ants.

AND this week, at work, I had a chance to marvel at them again, and as a result be able to obliterate Paris Hilton's whining, Prince Harry's gallavanting, Bush's Bullshit from my mind, if only for 5 glorious minutes.

A group of tiny little black ants, dwarfed as they were by their prey -- a green caterpillar 10 times the size of each of them individually -- had miraculously congregated to bite it repeatedly.

Despite its desperate writhing for life, the ants collectively were able to drag it slowly back to their colony.

I wondered as a kid, and I wondered again this week, how these ants communicated to each other so that they all came together to subdue that one caterpillar. "Hey, Harry, come on over here, I've got a big one!"

It's amazing. And it will always be amazing.

WHEN I was a kid, I used to collect insects every summer day. I'd go down the back lane on Kitson Street with my jar in hand, filled with twigs and a bit of soil, and lift every rotting 2 x 4 or log or rock I could find.

Most often, I was looking for beetles or centipedes or other solitary creatures.

Those that lived a solo existence were so easy to find and catch, even though they could bite harder and were faster and more elusive than any single ant. They were solitary. And that was their undoing.

Ants? They always intrigued me. Their colonies were so easy to find, because of their huge numbers and apparently dumb refusal to hide.

They weren't fast, they didn't bite very hard, they just did their business -- in great numbers. Which was their key to life.

THEY fascinated me.

My hope always was to capture enough of them so they might form their own community in my jar, dig their tunnels inside it and allow me to watch them carry their eggs, feed their young, etc.

Of course, it never worked. I'd wait for them to colonize. I'd provide them food. But they'd either die or I'd let them go free. It wouldn't work, no matter what I tried. They wouldn't bow to my control.

I was always baffled by that, but eventually I came to understand their simple intelligence and their nature.

IT was just my own stupid, self-centred human ignorance that caused me to think I could tame them by feeding them and trying to provide for them and nurturing them.

They, unlike us, don't have to be individuals. They don't get into personality conflicts. They don't go off to the corner and sulk when they don't get what they want. They don't get mad. They also don't get happy, I assume.

They don't complain when they don't get sex because for the most part, they NEVER have sex and couldn't have sex if they tried. They don't get married, so they don't get divorced. They never have child support payments.

They never have to worry about lawyers' bills, wills and testaments, family disputes over who gets what, beating out that fellow employee for the promotion or keeping up with the Joneses and getting themselves over-extended in debt.


Ants don't worry about death and dying, they just die. They don't have religion so they don't have to argue about the Far Right and the Far Left and whether they're going to be saved by the Rapture.

They have no awareness of whether they evolved or were magically created in an instant.

They don't need guns. They don't rape and pillage. When aggression surfaces, they fight it and eliminate it, or they die. They don't invade other places far beyond their territory just to claim that territory.

THEY don't have a crime problem and prison over-crowding in the ant world because either you toe the line or you die. You do your job or you perish or are destroyed.

They don't have pompous politicians full of B.S. and agendas, and there is no democracy.

There's no need for ANY political philosophy because there are no dictators, there are no sleazy money-grubbing politicians, there is no United Nations of Antdom, there is only life and survival of the group over the individual.

DOES all this mean I'd rather be an ant? No.

But it does mean that I think us "highly superior" human beens could learn a lot from ants and so many other creatures about working together instead of focusing on the innane things we sometimes consider all too important.

It's true, as far as we know, that ants have no emotions. We do.

I think that naturally, we're hard-wired to have the right feelings and do the right things at the right times, if we're just left to function with those basics. There's a natural beauty about us that is just right.

The poison that causes most of the troubles we have, I believe, are greed and our own absolute feelings that what WE feel has to be right...in religion, in politics and most of all, in expectations and survival.

Things have become too complicated for our minds to absorb and handle. It goes past us at light speed on the internet and on TV and we can't keep up, so we go along with it in fear of missing out on something.

The media and our consumer-oriented, buy-everything-to-feel-good, get-it-right-now culture is driving us crazy with expectation and the pressure to be what the TV and advertising tells us we should be.

We need to slow down. We need to be more selective in what we listen to and observe and what we pay attention to.

We need to care less about Paris Hilton and other stupid diversions from real life and we need to care more about things that matter to us as a much bigger collection of people who aren't like her and never will be.

The key to an ant's life is simplicity and doing what's supposed to be done. Of course we're so much more complex than ants.

But if we had a little more or their simple purpose and a little less of the cultural rhetoric we can't escape, we'd be better off. Get your antennae out. Sense what's really going on around you and if it really feels right.

If it does, more power to you. Go crazy. If it doesn't, then head over here. I've got a caterpillar I need help carrying.