The Ants Go Marching Down

Being an ant, you can never say that you are an individual or even a separate single organism. You belong to a colony. We live in a massive towering mound of dirt with clone after clone of ants sharing the same gender, exact physical features and designed life tasks. This is your purpose in a colony. To be born, live, work and die. The closest of our kind to ever being an individual is our single fertile female, the queen. She mates with us males and is protected by the unfertile females, until she dies which in that case she is automatically replaced. That is the closest to fifteen minutes of fame you can find in the colony.

Across from our dirt tower is a log, which houses a colony of termites. Not until recently did I realize that these creatures we have warred with, in our short time of existence, were just like us. Sure our color is different, us being red, them being white but in all truth our lives are models of each others’.

I was once watching a few ants from my colony take the nectar from Aphids. How vast our empire is I thought, yet in all reality we are working for something so pointless. Aphids share their juices we need and in return we give them our protection. But in a way aren’t we forcing them to pay for protection from us? Such imperialism shouldn’t be tolerated but of course they do. Day in a day out, we step all over them taking what we need and in return, for our insolence, we get nothing not even a silent rebellious jester.

This is all in the past, from when I was still part of the colony. Like all males we are just used for fertilization. We mate with the queen to fertilize the eggs, which need to be fertilized and then we are exiled, ostracized from the only thing we have ever been part of.

I wish my story ended their, because than I would have been like everyone else. My six legs carried me passed tree trunk after tree trunk, in an aimless stride. I did not know where I was going or when I would get there, only that I was going. Light from the high canopy above struck me, warming my hard exoskeleton. I hid from its blaze under a dried leaf, which lay upon the ground among countless others. In the leaf’s shady abyss came a centipede. He made a few movements toward me before snapping in an obvious decision to eat me. I ran out in fear. I feared death. This one event proved that I was different than those before me.

Through my travels I came upon a field. From the distance I could see a dark cloud. The sound of flapping wings came from it, in terrible numbers. I hid for cover in the under brush. The fog of locus fell onto the field consuming everything in its path. They ate the grain, stock, root, dirt, and many even cannibalized on each other. And as they came they went, leaving the once beautiful field desolate.

My eyes opened. I grasped a breath into my throat and swallowed it down hard. My mouth was dry, my vision a bit impaired. I sat up from the couch, which was my resting place, moments ago. Some educational special about ants was being showed on television. I picked up the remote and began changing the channels, in hopes of finding something thrilling, stopping to watch the president give another speech. I did not know his name. To me, he was the same as the last man four years before him and the man four years before him. Nothing ever changes. There was nothing special about that man speaking on television. He was just like any other person, hoping to make a difference. I am an ant I thought to myself, before getting up and getting ready for school. What is my task in life?