It’s summer in Mississippi and, of course, this means war.
The enemy is too numerable to count and varies in appearance and tactics. They are a cunning, adaptable foe. Our weapons, once effective, become strangely obsolete over time, and we struggle to arm ourselves against the enemy’s relentless assault.
It is a defensive war, fought in our homes. It is also a war that cannot be won: There will be no treaties, no boundaries re-drawn, no reconciliation.
Until recent times, human wars ceased during the cold months of winter.
It is much the same in this war, too. There may be a ceasefire, but we have learned that the onslaught will resume once the weather warms.
And in the hot summer months, the carnage is at its worst.
Each of us fight alone.
In one home, a man is waging a desperate war against a enemy whose presence is felt though difficult to see, an enemy whose stealth and unrelenting attacks are a particularly cruel form of psychological warfare.
A vast army of fleas has invested his house.
He sprays pesticides; they sneer, having developed an immunity to the poisons. He tries other weapons, old and new. He waits, he hopes and it dawns on him that his only option is to call in a professional. And even if that succeeds, he realizes, the enemy will likely return next summer.
In another home, a woman is faced with the enemy’s overwhelming air supremacy. Her old house has been sort of an aircraft carrier for wasps. Bravely, she shoots her aerosol surface-to-air missiles at their nests and the old home’s nooks and crevices where the wasps have been seen to retreat. But once one nest is vanquished, it seems three others have emerged, all filled with daring dive-bombers intent on extracting revenge for their fallen comrades.
In the other homes, fire ants are ambushing bare-footed innocents, possums and raccoons and armadillos move into yards and outbuildings like bad tenants, transforming them into eyesores and exacting a heavy toll on vegetable gardens, flower beds and once handsome lawns.
Squirrels gnaw at our wiring. Mice nibble through our insulation. Ticks imbed behind enemy lines.
We hit them with everything we’ve got — the latest new technological advances in the fields of poisons, pesticides and traps — and old “remedies” that are often no more than rumors, really. Some of them so ridiculous that we are almost embarrassed to try them for fear that it conveys to the enemy the message that, yes, we have reached the point of desperation.
We fight on, winning a few battles, holding the enemy at bay, conceding ground here and there if we must.
We survive. We endure. The winter will come, and then we will be able to lay down our weapons and rest.
But winter resides far over the horizon now.
So we fight on.
War is hell.
And eternal.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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