The other day, I tried to log into something, and the two-factor authentication was behaving strangely and giving me headaches. A few minutes earlier, I had been looking for a particular email without success. Then I remembered that my Gmail’s spam filtering has been overzealous lately, so I checked and found what I was seeking among my spam, along with a few other messages that should not have been there – a shipping confirmation from Amazon and an update from my kids’ school, to name a couple of them. Around this same time, a message popped up on my phone to let me know a call from an unknown number had been silenced and sent to voicemail, and in that moment I felt a surge of rage.
The only reason any of these things exist – two-factor authentication, spam filtering, and a toggle in my phone settings to silence unknown callers – is because there are bad actors out there who want to scam us and steal from us. I thought about how entire industries and vocations exist solely to thwart these people, and then I couldn’t avoid the thought that yes indeed, they are people. We’re not talking about robots or mindless collectives or people following orders of some big authority. The problem is individuals, fellow humans, who have made a decision to devote their time and their talents to scamming and stealing.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time outside, and during the summers in eastern Pennsylvania where I lived, there were a lot of bugs. Clouds of gnats buzzed into our mouths and eyes as we played summer baseball. In the evenings, hearing the whine of mosquitoes was a regular thing whenever you stopped moving, and we’d wave them away from our ears only to get bitten on our legs and arms. Japanese beetles ate my dad’s beloved roses every year, despite the presence of traps that would fill with them each week. And every August, hornets and a variety of wasps would arrive to feast on the bounty of rotting apples carpeting the orchard across the street from our house. There seemed to be at least one nest of yellowjackets in our yard each year, which we’d sometimes discover the hard way. Yellowjackets build their nests underground, and the only evidence of it is the hole they emerge from. If you linger too close to the hole or, say, pass over it with a lawnmower, the yellowjackets burst forth in a fury to defend their home, and you run away with a painful sting or two, or three.
We hated and cursed these bugs, but not all bugs. We didn’t mind bumblebees and honeybees. A honeybee would sting you, but only if you really provoked it – like, if you accidentally stepped on it while it was enjoying a dandelion or clover flower. And there were bugs we actually enjoyed. During the same evening hours of mosquito torment, there were also lightning bugs zipping around, which was magical. In the heat of the day, there were butterflies, lots of different butterflies. And sometimes we’d have a close encounter with something wonderful and exotic – like a praying mantis, katydid, or luna moth.
When I was a kid, I believed all of this was god’s creation, and when I would curse the mosquitoes or the nest of yellowjackets, sometimes I’d wonder why god made such things. What good is a mosquito or wasp? Even once I understood ecosystems and notions of ecological balance and interdependence, I still wondered how important gnats and mosquitoes really were. And while I still believed in god, I wondered why he would create ecosystems that depended on them, or why he couldn’t have made these necessary bugs less awful.
Even now as an atheist, I tend to assume that everything in nature serves an essential purpose, but a world without mosquitoes and wasps is still an appealing fantasy. I can’t point to anything about them that’s uniquely good.
Similarly, I believe that all human beings are complex and nuanced. When I am confronted with people whose ideas or choices I disagree with, and I wonder about their values, I try to put myself in their shoes. I am also aware of the limits of what I can know about them. Every person is a mystery, and nobody is simply bad. I know this on a fundamental level, but I honestly don’t and cannot understand the chain of choices that would lead someone to scam or steal from other people as a vocation. There’s no virtue there, and despite what I fundamentally understand, an angry part of me still insists that, no, the scammers and spammers are simply bad. They are wasps and mosquitoes. Be a honeybee.