I love wildlife stories. Always fascinating to discover how other living creatures on Earth manage to organize themselves into societies to survive and prosper. I remember “The Meerkats”, a documentary as beautiful as it was tragic. These movies know how to break your heart.
It’s always documentaries you stumble across. You can’t fall asleep. You turn on the TV and find yourself watching these animal tales. Recently, for me, it’s been about ants.
Incredibly ingenious and intelligent little creatures. Exhibiting complex behaviors. Able to accomplish workloads that would make us gasp. Able to practice forms of agriculture and medicine.
Living in highly organized societies where everyone has his or her role to play.
And above all, belligerent.
Ants are masters of the art of war. Wars are surely being waged in your attics and gardens. Wars that can last weeks, months or even years. And you’re not even aware of the slaughter going on.
Ants against ants.
Ants against termites and other insects.
And sometimes even battle between several factions.
Fierce battles are organized. Trench warfare. Wars of position. Weapons development. Because yes, ants are capable of technological innovation. They’re also capable of using geography to lay traps, camouflage or protect themselves.
Like those ants with round heads that position themselves to fill in holes, leaving no room for the enemy to infiltrate. These ants fight for territory, for food, when they feel threatened. But also to conquer.
Ant colonies led by power-hungry queens abound.
Ant wars are all around us and seem insignificant.
So insignificant that they don’t even seem to exist.
Millions of ants die every day. They sacrifice their youth, their workers, their warriors. Every day, these ant peoples sacrifice their lifeblood.
While legions of ants are preparing for the battle of their lives in your garden, on our scale, it’s a non-event. One might even say: what a waste!
Ask himself: why?
We’d like to be able to communicate with them.
We’d like to tell them that there are more than enough resources for everyone. That there must be solutions to avoid this massacre.
That a vast world exists outside their wars.
That they don’t have to sacrifice their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers and mothers in battles.
Why, after thousands of years of fighting, don’t they learn that peace is always better than blood? We’ll never know. It’s probably in their nature.
At a time when the drums of war are multiplying in our world. Where the horror of confrontation is already present in many countries. At a time when the vocabulary of certain leaders is becoming increasingly muscular. Maybe we’re just like those ants, unable to learn that peace is always better than blood.
Are we once again going to send all this strength and intelligence from the four corners of the world to annihilate each other?
With all this power and intelligence, we could build a paradise, but we keep building purgatories. Which we turn into a warlike inferno a few times a century.
War cannot be in our nature. Because we’re humans, not ants. We choose our consciences and we have the ability not to let ourselves be dominated by our instincts. This is our power as human beings.
We are the only beings endowed with consciousness, not instinct.
We watch ants wars with insignificance.
With insignificance, the stars watch man’s wars.
And they must be saying the same thing: what a waste.
Puts things into perspective . It's humbling truly, in some ways our actions are no better than the ants. Even though we can claim consciousness and reason, we still are no better.
There truly is so much more. Thank you for the thought-provoking read.