Friday, December 25, 2009.

sorry people, just came back from a trip to hong kong. though i did write a few essays over there when i had some time, and when i can extract them from my laptop i will. i am quite fond of some of the essays i wrote, so i shall be selective =D

apparently my last post was disastrous (i see people groaning hmm.) so i shall rectify that.

anyway, christmas was spent in a very gross fashion ill-befitting the day itself. basically, we had some spring cleaning at home - and spring cleanings don't usually go very nice especially when you have an insect infestation.

in this case, cockroaches decided to make themselves comfortable in one particularly nasty cabinet (nasty because it's not easy to clean).

being the only guy at home then, i was thus entrusted with the duty of getting rid of the problem. the problem however, was to figure out how to get rid of the problem. and the simplest method stared at me in the face - a bottle of roach spray.

and so i sprayed, literally gunning down each and every one of those monstrosities as if i was in charge of a firing squad.

my mum got a bit horrified at the way i took aim and fired - honestly, what ran through my brain then was just to fire and spray like nobody's business. she couldn't take it much longer, and said something which literally hit me hard on the head.

she commented, what i was doing was not much different from what the nazis did to all those jews - you make them breathe gas that kill them.

that was when i truly woke up and started thinking.

in this sense people can defend me and say that ultimately me killing roaches is completely different from hitler killing jews, because i'm killing pests while hitler killed people of his kind, his creed. and anyway, they were being nasty and coming out every night for dunnowhat, and given that my family would be really scared if they existed i wasn't doing the wrong thing anyway.

and surprisingly, i felt that way too.

who are we to take the lives of others, with a spray? my mum's analogy was in hindsight perfect - cockroaches are after all animals with a life, and what i did was exactly as she described it. it was systematic mass killing - you wage war on helpless creatures and basically overpower them.

that reminded me of a scene in ratatouille where the dad of the main rat told him about the horrors of Man against their species.

when i started clearing the corpses of those i killed, i realised the fundamental flaw in Man - that lower beings (or so they deem lower) are inherently overlooked and despised upon.

and for my own inability to discern that until my mum stepped in, i am ashamed of myself.

Labels: Life