The Ants Go Marching

For the whole of the spring semester, my room has been the primary setting of almost all social gatherings my group of friends has had. There has been a pretty constant stream of people in and out of my dorm door since January, and while I embraced and whole-heartedly enjoyed the good company, boundaries and general decorum quickly grew lax, and my roommate and I gradually started to get frustrated with the incredible messiness and inconsideration of our friends. Our snack drawer suddenly became public domain, and no one even offered to contribute to our growing grocery bill. People dirtied our dishes and left them scattered around the room, caked with Ramen noodles and popcorn butter. Every once in a while they’d be so kind as to set a used glass next to the sink, but a lather and rinse was out of the question. When there was no food, people got upset. When we asked for financial assistance, people got stingy. When we threatened to stop sharing, people got irate. It daily baffled me that these people, my close friends who I otherwise adore, had somehow developed such strong feelings of entitlement when they had done nothing to deserve my generosity.

But I let it slide. My roommate and I complained to one another about it before bed pretty much every night, but after each vent session, we went back to our passive hospitality. Part of me thought that maybe it just came with the territory; we had made our room very homey and relaxed and welcoming, and because we wanted our friends to enjoy the time they spent there, that meant mandatory giving.

Today, however, as we cleaned up the filth of everyone’s socializing for what I pray will be the final time, we found a colony of ants in the corner. And I hit the roof.

The ants aren’t even by the fridge or the fruit basket or the food drawer, they’re in the corner between our couch and chair, behind a lamp and a fountain. But, alas, there were plenty of crumbs for them to feast on! If you’re familiar with this corner of my room, you understand how absurd it is that there are chunks of food back there. And yet it looks like someone literally threw pieces of some unidentified cracker onto the floor. I was simultaneously enraged and disgusted. Because of my foolish kindheartedness, I have been living in a bug-infested room for who knows how long, and, to top it all off, I had to go spend more of my own money on a can of Raid to remedy a problem that I didn’t even cause.

And as I grimaced and pushed the blue plastic button to shoot the stream of white, foamy poison into the crack from which the insects crept, it occurred to me: what will be the metaphorical ants for our country? It sounds ridiculous, I know, but this situation in my dorm room this semester is analogous proof of the numerous failings of socialism, and we’re headed right for infestation.

When no one is held accountable for his own behavior, when no one has to clean up his own messes, when everything is always passed off as someone else’s responsibility, things fall apart. The government (or in this case, my roommate and I) has to go around and tidy up after everyone, and finds itself being incapable of keeping up. Further, everyone else falls into a pattern of lethargy and unaccountability, and the population becomes a helpless, insouciant leech.

I look at my friends and get so frustrated because I know that each one of them is completely capable of rinsing a bowl or vacuuming up their dropped crumbs or buying their own food, and they choose not to because I’ve been doing it for them.

Socialism stifles effort. It discourages hard work and self-sufficiency, and it breeds a stagnant economy. We will stop achieving the great things for which America is known, and our government will begin to spoon feed us because they’ll think we need them to.

Maybe my friends were happy contributing nothing in exchange for their own comfort and satiation. Maybe that’s because the dorm room government didn’t demand taxation from them as payment for its services. Therein lies the difference between this small-scale socialist system and the potential United States of America. In my room, my roommate and I resented our friends’ dependence; the current administration longs for ours. They want us to need them. They want us to be controllable, and they want to take everything we have as payment for their so-called generosity.

Instead of free food and dishwashing, it’s health care and subpar education. Instead of bickering before bed, it’s increased legislation and control. Instead of ants, it’s the disintegration of freedom and the dimming light of the shining city on a hill.

The ants are marching one by one. Hoorah, hoorah. Fairness Doctrine. Health care reform. Tax hikes. Enormous spending. Defense cuts. Immigration lenience. Revoking the 2nd Amendment. Buying up mortgages. Cap and trade. Upsetting our allies. Embracing our enemies. Earmarks. Pork. Deficits. Corruption. The death of bipartisanship. The promotion of fear.

Hoorah.

If ants were mine, what will be the country’s last straw? I saw and hated the direction in which my room’s politics were moving but did nothing to stop it. But we who acknowledge the looming plunge into socialist dependence must stand and fight. We must demonstrate our ability to live well, to live better, without governmental help, and we must spray the preemptive Raid all over those who try to usurp our inalienable rights as humans