It's my 31st year teaching high school and my lessons just keep getting better and smarter and funnier and more relevant and more brilliant-- case in point, yesterday I'm teaching the Orwell masterpiece "Shooting an Elephant" and the main thrust of the story is that Orwell does NOT want to shoot this elephant, but the crowd expects him to shoot the elephant-- he's the colonialist MP with the gun and while the Burmese despise him, he is the authority figure and the elephant, while in heat, did kill a man-- but then the elephants calms down and Orwell does not want to shoot a large, valuable intelligent working beast of burden-- but, as Orwell describes it, the expectation that the elephant was to be shot "was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides, they wanted the meat"-- so Orwell has to live up to their expectations of the imperaliast despot and shoot the elephant-- and it is tragic and horrible . . . and while the students were in groups figuring this out, a girl came up to me and said, unironically, "There's a bee, can you kill it?" and I went over to their group, and there was indeed a bee on the wall (actually a yellowjacket, which is a wasp) and I said to the group-- which was very distracted by the wasp-- "I don't really want to kill this animal, I'm not allergic-- but I guess I'm going to have to kill it so you people can concentrate" and then I killed the wasp and I asked the class how this incident was like the story and they were able to make the connection and then I told them that sometimes-- especially if you have read lots of literature like myself and are very very smart and know how the world works-- you can resist the pressure of the crowd and the pressure to live up to the generic expectations of an authority figure and transcend commonplace thought and so I told them the story of the bald-faced hornet nest above my driveway and how, at first, at the urging of my family and friends, I felt like I had to attack and destroy the nest-- and the hornet's nest is the elephant in this analogy-- and my son and I even made one attempt to destroy the nest but the hornets were unruffled by our attack (see the above video, which my class enjoyed) and then I told them about how my friends continued to pressure me to annihilate this nest, suggesting wilder and wilder methods-- dousing the nest with gasoline and incinerating it; attacking it with a drone; getting up on a ladder and sawing the branch off with a chainsaw and dropping the nest into a garbage pail; etcetera-- they wanted to see more videos, they wanted a bit of fun, just like the Burmese-- and while I thought about doing something radical and violent to the nest, I then realized I was being pressured into something that did NOT need to occur-- something I did NOT want to do: bald-faced hornets eat mosquitoes and flies, and-- even though Ian and I attacked them-- the hornets forgave us and did not seek vengeance, so instead of destroying the nest, I learned to live with it-- it's been up in the tree for months now-- and I think this is a better path, to try to live in some kind of peaceable detente with dangerous creatures, just as we might need to learn to live with (and occasionally suffer attacks from) megafauna, if we actually value animals such as elephants and tigers and bears-- if we truly value all the creatures great and small on this earth, then we're going to have to learn to live with them-- even though we might occasionally suffer a sting or a trampling-- because we've invaded every nook and cranny of their habitats.
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