Lessons From an Electric Flyswatter

With bonus content from the Bard

One of the best videos taken of me this year involves me (recently sleeping), a cockroach (progressively more dead), and an electric flyswatter. (The electric flyswatter, if you haven’t yet encountered one, is an ingenious invention a bit like a tennis racquet. It’s smaller, though, and touching a button on the handle makes the strings hum with electricity.) When I almost ran over a salamander while biking yesterday, that video was, naturally, the first thing that sprang to mind.

I was rolling down a slope toward the end of my ride, and I was tired. Standing up on the pedals with a finger on each brake, I leaned to the left, to the right, pushing forward to stretch out legs stiff from almost three hours in the saddle. Cool, mid-August air rushed past me as I sat back, spinning into the flat at the bottom of the hill. I looked down to check my gear and a small movement caught my eye on the pavement just ahead: a bright orange, very flat movement, directly in my path. A surge of adrenaline coursed through my tired muscles as I realized it was a salamander, and I swerved just in time to avoid flattening it. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw a streak of orange scramble into the grass and disappear.

Since I was a child, I’ve designated myself the resident creepy-crawly removal person in each of my classrooms, dorms, and apartments. This is not “remove” as a euphemism for “kill,” but “remove” in the most literal sense: a change of place. I take pride in that. It scratches a very specific itch to be the person who moves toward the thing that everyone else in the room is shrinking away from, though the feedback of other humans has never been my main motivator. Rather, it is that killing a spider, centipede, beetle, [insert any other insect/arachnid here], just because it is somewhere I don’t want it to be feels profoundly wrong to me. How would we feel if a being larger than we are decided that we were in the wrong place and ground us under its heel, flushed us down a toilet, or ran us over? So I get a piece of paper, perhaps a cup, too, and relocate the little being to the nearest outdoor location. (Of course, it’s worth noting that some of these critters have surely died anyway, because sometimes the nearest outdoor location is out a window.)

There’s something about cockroaches, though, that makes me want to be a hypocrite. I went the paper-cup-window route with most of the roaches we found in our apartment last year, but some, like the one in that video, were just too big—or so I told myself—too fast, too likely to fly into my face if I maneuvered wrong. I told myself, too, that I was too tired to be sure I would maneuver right, too tired and I didn’t want a face full of cockroach, too tired and how much did they really feel in their tiny, gross, shell-clad bodies? I didn’t want to choose mercy. It’s easier to use a tool to electrocute something that makes your skin crawl than it is to hold the paper it scrabbles against. There’s a greater distance, physically and emotionally, a permission to do what you otherwise wouldn’t. I wouldn’t crush a cockroach under my shoe, but I held the flyswatter over the roach as the electricity zapped and the acrid, burning smell sizzled into the air. Afterward, I went to the window and shook the body into the night. I don’t like to think about what it means that I can be too tired to choose mercy.

Perhaps you feel I’m making too much of this small moment, and perhaps you’re right. But small moments can have large implications, and I think this is one of them. We distance ourselves from the guilt of killing a cockroach or a salamander by using a tool like a flyswatter or a bike, use the internet (usually social media) as a tool to say hurtful things we never would face to face, and when politicians and courts deny rights to women, queer folks, people of color, the list goes on, aren’t they, too, using a tool to give them distance from the hurt they cause?

It would have been easier for me to roll over the salamander yesterday, easier to continue straight than to make the small semi-circle to avoid running it over, but, as so many proverbs tell us, the easy choice is not always the right one. When we are bigger, stronger, more physically or socially powerful, we can deal out death to insects, to salamanders, to other humans, but what gives us the right to do so? In other words—just because we can doesn’t mean we should, or do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or any other saying that urges compassion, empathy, mercy, that reminds us that if we have the power to kill, we also have the power to live and let live. It might take a bit more work, a bit more time, a bit more effort to educate ourselves, but isn’t it worth it?

P.S. A bonus Shakespeare quote that springs to mind:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes

(The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I)