Eating up the World

When the Japanese beetles first invaded, they went straight for the rose bushes, all the rose bushes from the hardy dune roses to the prissy tea ones. They came in droves, like a plague of locusts, and ate the bushes bare. Some did not recover from their voraciousness.

I know when I am outgunned. Hundreds of those luminously shiny gold beetles to one of me. I gave up on the dune roses and let that disgusting army of destroyers have them. When I didn't see them on the dune roses this year, I of course thought my merit had kicked a protection circle in. I dedicated the merit. Ha ha. Turns out they simply broadened their tastes, like the frenzied nouveau riche racing from one food fad to another. They didn't want the usual this year. No. Those little gold blobs of supersized destruction were munching away on the dark maroon leaves of the sand cherry tree and the spiky red flowers on the other side of the path. The telltale lacy leaves were everywhere. How was I to know the beetles buffet is why my never fail hydrangeas were keeling over?

I was so enraged, I wanted to kill. I didn't care about the karma. I told myself I had to kill those killer bugs to protect the life of innocent plants, my plants. Every beetle booted from the yard meant, by the way they breed, dozens less next year. With baggies, plastic tubs and glass jars I mounted a campaign, stalking the enemy and piling up bodies in those transparent containers. Defiantly, I left them under the plants as a cemetery, a warning--the way the ancients used to leave severed heads mounted on gateposts.

I did in a dozen at a time but new ones soon took their places on those now fragile plants. I grouchily snatched more and more, telling myself I was hastening each beetle on to a higher rebirth, maybe as a skunk. That would be the animal realm, and that would be one step above these hungry ghosts who so perfectly illustrated the ravenous appetite and inability to stop that the Buddha described.

Today, as I slid another destructive dozen into the glass jar, I was thinking how friends have been phoning me the past few days to tell me stories about Mongolia are in just about every magazine and newspaper now. It is the country du jour. Most of the stories are of course about the world's investors and corporations swarming all over, trying to dig up the Gobi Desert to get to the world's largest untapped gold and copper mines.

And so as the last beetle slipped into my jar, I couldn't see any difference between these hungry ghosts feasting on my plants and those human hungry ghosts feasting on the Gobi Desert. Like a plague of locusts, the mining companies swarm from one site to another, hungrily gobbling up the land and spitting it out. Then the reporters fly in and chew up the goings on. Our crazed consumer corporate culture has made most of us hungry ghosts who wanna be or gotta have. And that creates even hungrier ghosts who fly around tearing up this planet from the Amazon to the Gobi and the pure Arctic waters off Alaska, leaving them for dead like my plants.

There doesn't seem to be a jar big enough to catch any of these devastating critters in.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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