The Scritchering

Sylvia Shawcross

Please note: This is not a humour column so avoid if despondent or if a highly judgmental holier-than-thou arse feeling omnipotent on a keyboard and by just writing that I realize that some people will get their backs up before even reading the piece and I’d like to remind everyone that medical experts say that getting your back up is bad for the lumbar spine and could lead to pain and frustration.

And I also realize that I’m being a holier-than-thou arse myself by criticizing here and possibly furthering the divisiveness however it is November and it is cold outside and to hell with self-reflection today and I’m only human which is more than I can say about some people but then…I digress…

Now, the long-horned beetle scrapes the ridges on their head on their bodies to produce that nails-on-chalkboard-styrofoam-rubbing-together noise that you can hear at night sometimes in parks up north in Canada where the forest floors are soft with rust coloured pine needles.

(Okay, maybe those are different beetles but they “could” be long-horned beetles for the sake of argument or at least for this opinion piece.)

Now, why the long-horned beetle decided to evolve to head-rubbing cacophony we really don’t know. Or maybe someone almost knows. Maybe some research scientist—who has probably taken up drinking copious amounts of cognac with cola in the starlit evenings to fend off the ferocious futility of not knowing why that damn beetle keeps scritching—maybe that scientist almost knows but doesn’t quite.

Always that damn scratching. To what end? It seems to serve no useful purpose after all. Evolutionary-wise anyway.

Now some would say our reigning politicians seem to be long-horned beetles. They scritch their heads when asked questions and make noises to the point that we simply find it very hard or even don’t listen to them anymore. They’re background. They are a repetitive pattern. They are just the beautiful people with bodies scritched smooth with all-the-same speeches to ubiquity.

We get no “inspired from the heart and soul” speech from any one of them. So will they limp into the historical records as just names we might once have known who were part of a group who wanted to change the world? We hungrily looked for inspiration, hope and courage and found oatmeal. The finest kind of course, all organic and steelcut but still just oatmeal. All the same oatmeal. Considering we paid for caviar….

They are beautiful though. We have to give them that. Macron, Trudeau, Ardern, Sunak, Marin, et al… It was in the job description. But still, they scritch. That awful noise. That awful awful noise.

Have they become the bugs they want us to eat? Have they become the smooth-skinned all-the-same robotic examples of intelligence being artificial; acting in concert without original thought? The script of the scritch? Do they scritch and pitch and snitch and bitch and ditch if appropriate?

Some believe that they are busy polishing their rigid ridges believing the noises that they make are symphonies—that they believe we like their noise—that what they think is music is going to save the world. They’re singing for us aren’t they? And don’t we all have to sing the same song to the same music? The maestro is waving frantically and we’re all just not paying attention anymore and he’s getting red in the face now.

Oh, the hubris of belief that they can make the world. The would-be-gods of this world who may not quite know the difference between dream and delusion. To be fair, it’s often hard at the beginning to tell the difference. And we are only at the beginning. And maybe there isn’t enough cognac and cola to get us through this right now. Or maybe there is but there’s no way for the truckers to get it to us. We’ll have to drink the raindrops in the storm.

Some say it is never a good idea to give wings to a bureaucrat. Even to save the world that might need saving. They are very nice sometimes, the bureaucrats, but still they are bureaucrats who tend to live in front of their eyes and never turn their heads to see a different landscape where most people live. They just never quite understand. They follow the plan. That’s what they do. They are civil servants who have forgotten now who they are to serve but they work hard for sure.

Yet, while remaking the world, what was the point of hurting us until that time when it would fail or succeed? Of poking and prodding and controlling and maiming and judging and frightening and wearing us down and sending us to war? What would have been the point? Do they care only for themselves and the planet they want for they seem not to be constructing one for all of us? Do they understand that those who own nothing have nothing left to lose. Or did they think of that at all?

We are simply incidental to the plan. We don’t know it to be different because they’ve not told us many truths. “If only we knew,” perhaps they’d say. Then perhaps they should have told us. We’re likely more able to handle it. We have learned to live in places they have never known and in ways they could not imagine and with a faith they would not understand.

But they tell us nothing.

Even though we are most of the world, they do not know us.

We are the not-them people. They live in bubbles and we live in pine forests where the needles from the trees are too soft to burst the bubbles of those that live in them. But even Ghandi understood the power of the vulnerable and the broken and those who were tender by nature and design. He knew that violence never did solve anything.

But how we want to burst their bubbles sometimes. Yet we are neither the monsters nor the fools they think we are. (When they actually choose to think of us at all.) We have compassion for their ignorance for it is not easy to live in a sphere breathing the same air, singing the same songs, drifting sifting lifting to wherever the wind blows favourably for some.

Because that’s what people in bubbles always do. They pay a price that we the not-them would never choose to pay. For we had elders who explained that the price we pay may not involve wealth and property and image. We needed no bubbles once we understood the protection afforded of a free and honest life well-lived.

Yes, we know it is not easy to live encased in a bubble that is strangely iridescent beautiful in the sun but a cage none-the-less. Some born to the bubble, some striven to it, some picked for it, some paid to it, some even blackmailed into it. But all in a cage drifting in the direction they’ve been steered. To turn and spin in the winds of war perhaps now. It’s where their bubbles led them.

But who steers the winds that sift and shift the air around the bubbles of the entitled? Are these ill winds driven not by reason nor by compassion but fear, control, conformity, power and ultimately greed? Do those in bubbles recognize the wind for what it is? What is the difference between a dream and a delusion when the winds are raging and all-encompassing?

Do they understand things really? Those who would rule the world. Perhaps they do and yet we who are the not-them will be blamed either way when the bubbles burst. This much we know. We’re used to guilt. They’ve taught us that. We munch it with our cricket protein smoothies every morning now.

Or maybe they really love us and want us to be happy and will cry for us. They can say they tried. And we can say we cried for we have already done all the trying we could when we could still do such things and when we thought they would listen. But now it is of course, our fault. But we will still never stop trying.

Ghandi would have cupped the long-horned beetle in his worn hands and laughed into the forest, because for all the noise it makes, it is still just a beetle scritching sounds into the dark skies. And we are just the forest creatures listening in the night waiting for daybreak.

We, who do not live in bubbles with our gentle souls have Ghandi. We do not lose faith in Humanity because it is an ocean.

We, the not-them, are an ocean.

Here’s an earworm for the elite as they plan the world for us all (because they love us):

And here’s a bug song suggested courtesy of Sean Veela from last week’s chat:

Favourite quote from last week’s chat from Ravensara:

“They can do whatever they like – and we do not know their goals, which may be unimportant! We know love, camaraderie, music, philosophy, ethics, the fact that we are all flawed and living here perhaps to learn wisdom in our souls. For what else?”

Favourite off-site suggestion that is perfectly suited as our new anthem of the age suggested by mig: