The darkling beetle saga--Part 2

D. Grant Haynes with darkling beetle

In early January when all was frozen outside and the days were frightfully short, I shared with you, my readers and browsers, the story of a darkling beetle (Eleodes spp.) that had emerged from somewhere and entered my warm apartment. The little fellow had paced back and forth for three days and nights when I became aware he would dehydrate and die soon if I did not take some action.

As related previously, I set up a small terrarium on my kitchen floor and sought to make the darkling beetle happy. I knew nothing about the care and feeding of the tiny creature. He, obviously, knew nothing about the large entity that was offering him aid and comfort, rather than squashing or spraying him.

We learned much about one another over the next weeks and months.

Now, more than three months after offering safe haven to one beetle that would have frozen in January's cold, I have six darkling beetles. No, there has been no multiplication of the species here. Rather, other darkling beetle wayfarers have emerged from the woodwork of the apartment from time to time. I have introduced each to the original boarder and they seem to have all gotten along well.

One of the beetles was found outside my door early on a particularly cold March morning. He appeared to be close to expiration. I assume the cold, or possibly some residual pesticide from management's determined spraying of each threshold last summer, had affected him. He could move nothing but his antennae when placed with the others. I expected to find him dead by the next day, but to my surprise, he gradually recovered!

I came to appreciate these harmless little vegetarian creatures more when I observed the healthy ones come and sit quietly by their ailing brother day after day. I cannot know what was communicated nor what healing touch or energy they conveyed, but it apparently worked.

I realized darkling beetles are capable of the rudiments of compassion and other soul qualities men in their arrogance may think are reserved for themselves.

I had read that darkling beetles eat decaying plant material. Not knowing what else to do, I introduced them to mulch from under conifers in my yard and changed the mulch every week or so. They survived on whatever they found in it for over two months. But recently, on impulse, I placed a small bit or raw broccoli (a leaf) in their enclosure. I learned that they love broccoli! Within minutes, they were lined up as tiny pigs at a trough, each munching on the broccoli. They receive a ration of several bits of broccoli daily now.

How long must this continue? When will I put them outside and, in doing so, turn them back to God, Love, the Universal Spirit, from which we all emanate and in whose merciful arms we all ultimately reside? Soon, I hope. I would have expected them to have been liberated long before the third week of April. But the winter has been a severe one in Eastern Washington and the nights are still dropping below freezing quite often.

I am anxious to release these harmless creatures so they can do "beetle" things during the brief summer they are allocated as a life form indigenous to Washington State. I hope to do so by May 1.

My visitants have taught me much and I am grateful to have known them.

D. Grant Haynes
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Update:

I released my seven little darkling beetle charges today, May 19. I had never intended to keep them so long, but cold nights persisted well into the present month. And they had appeared to be comfortable and at peace in my care.

Still and all, they deserved to be free to do beetle stuff during the brief Pacific Northwest summer about to begin in earnest.

I released the beetles far from human habitation with its pesticides, herbicides and lawn mowers.

I made a brief video of their departure--something I may seek to incorporate into a comprehensive statement about my philosophical underpinnings and my long-held belief in the sanctity of all life forms.

D. Grant Haynes

Francesca should have opened that door!

(What follows is a movie review I wrote on Amazon.com in 2002 concerning the film adaptation of Robert James Waller's book, "The Bridges of Madison County". My review was named one of the top seven for the movie out of hundreds some years later. -- DGH)

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I viewed Hollywood's adaptation of Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County" last evening. I had seen the film initially some years ago and regarded it as much ado about nothing for the most part at that time.

But I was struck in this new viewing more than before by the universality of Francesca Johnson's dilemma. Perhaps maturation and recent life experiences have generated a heightened understanding and awareness on my part.

Robert Kinkaid possessed a few of the qualities that have both inspired and dogged me during my middle years.

He was a rootless writer and photographer, as well as a keen and cynical observer of the human condition. Kinkaid had been far and done much. He had seen and experienced multiple facets of life and love and possessed limitless anecdotal knowledge of the world. He offered much to Francesca in terms of sensitivity, understanding, appreciation of beauty and companionship that she would never find on an Iowa farm.

But Kinkaid lacked Middle America's major indicators of success and worthiness--roots sunk deeply in one geographic location, a home and real estate, and most importantly, a traditional Cleaver family mind set.

Francesca reluctantly opted for the Cleaver family syndrome, choosing security and safety over fascination, inspiration and love. She lived out her years with a boring Iowa pig farmer, remaining a lonely and empty woman with nothing but tattered memories of her brief encounter with Kinkaid.

Had I been writing the screenplay, I would have had her fling open that truck door and dash through the rain storm to head west with Robert Kinkaid.

For better or worse, that's the impulsive sort of decision that has governed my life more often than not.

But such actions and those who take them do not comfort the psyche of Middle America's puritanical heartland.

Though they know better from their own experiences and those of others, the majority of Americans--middle class protestant ones especially--prefer to keep their heads safely in the sand about life and the human condition, pretending still in a little house on the prairie dream world that probably never was--one that most certainly doesn't exist now.

All is well in this delusional world of make believe--one that's filled with Little League games, soccer moms, church suppers and PTO meetings. Marriage and family are still the rocks of civilization and the ostriches are "saved" and bound for Heaven. Their president, George W. Bush, is a worthy man with a commission from their God to root out homosexuality, abortion and Islam.

In my opinion, such as they dwell in the outer limits of utter darkness, living and dying without a clue about the past, the present, or the future. They're not living--they're merely existing in a state of perpetual denial, awaiting the flat line and the rude awakening that will likely follow.

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is termed resignation is confirmed desperation."

Francesca Johnson completed her life journey in this condition of quiet desperation. I think that's a damned shame. I wanted more for her. I wanted her to go with Robert Kinkaid and seek a few years of happiness and joy while they each had the time and opportunity.

D. Grant Haynes

The Sheeple

The people have spoken, goddamn them. -- Mo Udall

Chapter 2

This brief section in which I decry the apparent collective stupidity of the American electorate in giving George W. Bush fresh mandates to continue his madness at home and in the Middle East in 2002 and again in 2004 is the one segment above all others that my fainter-hearted friends have advised me against including in this volume. “You will only alienate readers and cause them to close your book by publishing such ire and rancor”, I have been advised. Perhaps so in some cases, though I hope not. But I do not seek to win a popularity contest anyway.

No record of the Bush administration-induced anguish that has dominated my thinking and emotions for the last six years would be complete without an honest expression of what I felt at moments of greatest despair and disgust during these terrible years. I am not dishonest enough to omit these statements. Or, alternatively, I am foolhearty enough to include them.

Americans could have rebuffed Bush in the 2002 mid-term elections, but they didn’t. This was inexplicable and unforgivable, I thought. My statements at the time reflected those sentiments.

And after the presidential election of 2004 when blindered Americans had voted Bush into office still again, thereby expanding his mandate to drag our nation ever deeper into the worst domestic and international malaise since the Great Depression, at least, I was, frankly, livid.

At that point Bush had established an indisputable track record of lies and double dealing about Iraq.

At that point he had expanded his unrelenting plutocratic attack on the middle class of America with more tax breaks for the wealthy, diminution of welfare funding, and relaxation of environmental laws to favor his fat cat contributors from the energy and other sectors.

Nothing had gone well since his appointment as president in December 2000, but here we were four years later facing four more years of the hell he had already put us through.

This, because Americans had not displayed enough collective intelligence to kick the bums out in the 2004 election. Rather, too many Americans were still crouching in dark corners expecting the Bush administration to protect them from “terrists” from without when, in truth, Bush and his cabal were the worst terrorist in America and in the world at the time. Or so I felt and wrote.

The tide is finally turning in the spring of 2007. Bush has few friends on either side of the congressional aisle and the most lethargic American couch potatoes are willing, finally, to listen to criticism of their president.

The corporate media whores are even finding a voice and daring to speak out after years of cutting Bush slack and presenting White House press releases as the gospel.

But it’s too little and it’s too late. The darkness from which our nation and the world must recover in the post-Bush years will linger for decades. It did not have to be so.

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Excesses of blind patriotism annoying, dangerous

November 17, 2001

Dear Post-911 Flag-Waving Fellow Americans:

After reading your newspapers--after listening to your corporate media's propagandistic version of the so-called "War Against Terrorism" now under way in Afghanistan--after seeing your flag-decked SUVs with the Pisces emblems on the one side and National Rifle Association stickers on the other--after enduring this national adrenalin rush daily for the past two months--I have concluded that you are, by and large, a shallow, callous, insular, naively manipulable and infinitely self-righteous lot.

You are dangerously intoxicated at this time with a virulent strain of myopic ethnocentrism approaching Third Reich fanaticism--one that is most unattractive to the quiet minority here who can't in good conscience join your sloganeered, bumper-stickered, anthem-singing, flag-flapping, Arab-hating hysteria.

You are riding the crest of a wave of blind arrogance, egocentric hedonism and aggressive nationalism that cannot last--one that will inevitably lead to a cataclysmic fall in time.

I do not know how these things will evolve. I am no prophet or seer. But of this I am reasonably certain. You will be--you must be--humbled. Karmic laws are inexorable, inescapable and universal. America is ripe for a humbling as the 21st Century begins.

I do not wish this to be the case. I live here, as have my forebears for at least six generations. I have children and grandchildren who will suffer when the collapse occurs. But I see this national adjustment as inevitable.

You as a people are not better than--you do not deserve more of everything than--any other group on the planet.

You do not possess an inherent right to abuse--to show utter disregard for--other human cultures and groups, as well as every other species with which you share this tiny blue orb.

You do not possess an inherent right to destroy the very Earth that has nurtured you with your outsized contribution to global pollution--one that will bring catastrophic climate changes and sea level alterations within the present century.

You are not so very special and unique as you may imagine, flag-waving Americans. Deity has not singled you out for preferential treatment and predestined dominance. You are merely the current bully on the block--an ephemeral thing at best. Bullies come and go.

In the longer view of history, you will go the way of other civilizations that became overly extended, overly aggressive, overly confident, overly materialistic, and overtly abusive toward all that did not embrace unflinchingly their narrowly defined interests and values.

I have thought often during recent days of Thomas Jefferson's remark regarding the institution of slavery--a gathering storm in his time.

He said, "... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Indeed, I tremble today for my country because I know my fellows are on a course that cannot end well.

Strollers enjoy California's Mendocino Coast at Fort Bragg

Nature's children dying so your fat ass can ride in air-conditioned luxury

They've kept the pictures from national circulation for over six weeks, for the most part, but the Huffington Post first, and now the Boston Globe, have shown the courage to expose the horrors being visited on wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of the British Petroleum oil disaster.

Each of the thousands of life forms dying daily in the Gulf of Mexico from crude oil poisoning possesses as equally an inherent right to exist and be happy on this planet as do you, Homo sapiens.

You may be the dominant life form here for now, but you are also the darkest life form and the one most deserving of extinction.

Your day will come, Homo sapiens, as the Earth cleanses herself of your foul presence and begins again the pageant of life.

D. Grant Haynes

If BP capped the well today (June 3, 2010), what the hell is that belching forth in the Gulf of Mexico on this allegedly live camera feed?

Dead sea turtle that washed ashore on Mississippi coast May 5

Alien landscape?

Alien, indeed, for creatures of the Gulf of Mexico that are floundering and dying in choking crude oil now coming ashore in Louisiana.

Pea soup smog presided over an oil slicked and dying Gulf of Mexico May 7--an altogether fitting commentary on man's blindness, self-centeredness, and greed.

Men, nations and worlds are subject to the universal cosmic law of karma. Modern industrial man will reap what he has sown in destroying the Earth over which he was given stewardship.

D. Grant Haynes

Earth's day will come only when men and their machines are gone

The first meaningful Earth Day will come when men and their destructive technology are rusting, deteriorating relics from another time.

Until such time, all the rest is so much falderal about nothing--a feeble attempt by a few to tap into the collective guilt of the many and sell posters, tee shirts, and trinkets on the side.

Earth Days mean nothing to the politicians, industrialists, and assorted greed hounds that dominate every industrialized society on the planet.

These evil men continue to destroy ecosystems and life forms at an accelerating pace, even as their public relations arms churn out an Earth Day press release or two each April.

D. Grant Haynes