… Suzanne Ecklund, who posted this on Facebook:
I spent the last 15 minutes trying to rescue a giant roach that had inadvertently walked onto a lint roller. Many of you know this from your own experiences of rescuing giant roaches from lint rollers that once you free one leg, the roach then walks forward onto more sticky tape and you're back to square one. So you have to put paper down on the exposed sticky tape so that the roach has a non-sticky place to walk once its limbs are free. (I know you know all of this. Sorry for the redundancy.) Anyway, I was having a really hard time getting the right object to free the legs from the sticky tape. (I don't own a Roach Freedom Device, though, hint: Christmas 2015.) So I used a needle on one of my cat's disposable syringes. (He's diabetic and gets insulin shots, naturally.) The needle worked well because I could slide it under the roach's legs and free the legs from the tape. When I finished this rescue effort, I put the emergency flares away and went to cap the needle before throwing it away. But rather than capping it, I just stabbed myself.
POSTSCRIPT, 6/1: "Roach update: Last night I made a humane roach trap out of a greased jar and a paper towel soaked in beer. Of course, when I was releasing the roaches in the garden this morning, my neighbor came out with his dogs. He looked at me strangely so I had to explain."
Around here, the “giant” roaches are so giant that when they’re not moving the furniture around, they just pick up the lint rollers and throw them at me. It’s not easy to remove lint rollers from one’s hair…
I’m sorry, but I just can’t imagine feeling the need to be “humane” toward a roach. I probably would have immersed the lint roller in boiling water, thrown it — and the boiled roach — in the trash, and bought a new one (lint roller, not roach). Guess that’s why I sit in the congregation instead of standing up front telling people how to be good.
Roaches aren’t people too, Gerry. But I once missed a short putt on a golf course and, on my enraged way to tap the ball in, spotted a harmless (and quite charming) little red bug making its way along. And I crushed it with my putter. I missed a putt, and that bug paid with its life. I felt TERRIBLE, as I should have. (As you can tell, by my reciting this story 15 years later.)
As wrong as I have been in the other direction, I cannot tell Suzanne she’s wrong in this direction.
In fact, I must glorify her spirit, however nutty I (and she) know it to be.
She’s not wrong. But when it comes to roaches, bed bugs, mosquitoes, and certain other creepy-crawlies (if you’ve ever been bitten by a deer-fly, you’ll sympathize), I just have a really hard time adhering to my pacifist principles.