$400.00 prize

HotspinTV · February 5, 2012

I was recently hooked by the local rag, a pitiful excuse for a newspaper which I will not bother to name, with the promise of winning $400.00 in cash for the best 750 word story. Only 50 cents a word, but four hundred clams can buy a lot of beer so I wrote an essay and sent it entirely confident that my unique combination of wit and reason would prevail. However I failed to read the fine print and was informed that my story would not be accepted unless I paid a mandatory $10.00 admission fee. What horse $#*%!!!

Anyways here is a copy of the story, you tell me if you think I deserved to win.

THE LIFE LESSON

by Rec Alexander

I had been watching a cockroach, crawling across a white tiled floor, when a woman standing across from me also spotted the tiny creature. Without any sign of remorse or hesitation, she calmly stepped forward and crushed the bug under her heel before turning back to the conversation in which she was engaged.

I looked to the woman, who seemed oblivious to the harm she had intentionally caused, then back to the roach, as it began to move one of its legs, as if it was desperately waving for help from underneath its trampled shell.

I thought to myself, how terrible the nature of man (or in this case woman), to be so superficial in judging what should live and what should die. Although I am no lover of the roach, I pray that God does not judge me by looks alone and that, if God has the mind of a woman, I hope she is not so merciless as too leave me writhing in agony, the way the woman left the cockroach to die slowly from a sloppy assassination.

I wondered, as the roach continued to brandish its tiny limb, would the woman have been so thoughtlessly cruel to a butterfly or a baby seal? Yes men are wicked for hunting beasts for meat and pelts. They are wicked for using guns to support their families. They are wicked when they cut down forests and drill for oil, because they are destroying nature for profit. But what woman does not desire a diamond ring, or to be adorned with the finest furs? It is true that men murder each other in senseless wars, but who wears the gowns made from slave picked cotton?

More than one half of the human population is composed of women and it is women who are traditionally given the privilege of raising our young. So why is it that women find themselves feeling inferior to men? Why is it that women do not teach their children to be kind and thoughtful. How is it that some boys grow up to be abusive towards women? After all, isn’t human behavior a result of learning from example?

These were my thoughts as I gazed upon the crippled bug, suffering simply because the woman found it repulsive, and I wondered; if it is such a terrible sin for a man to beat his wife, what special place in hell is reserved for the mother who abuses her child?

And yet I see this all the time. In supermarkets and subways, frustrated women drag their sobbing kids stopping to smack them or shake them. It is the child’s prerogative to react to such treatment with tears and screams, but what a lack of dignity a full grown woman reveals when she cannot control her own emotions. And inevitably this is when it all falls to pieces, when you forget to stop, take a breath and analyze the situation.

… Then again, I guess it’s always easier to blame the son of a bitch who knocked you up.

These days the parks are filled with protestors who demand accountability. They want accountability from our politicians, from our bankers and the captains of oil tankers. But what about demanding accountability from yourself? You can’t control what other people do, but you can control how you react.

I should have reacted by finishing off the poor bastard and putting the roach out of its misery. But I was too horrified by the fact that this woman, who was someone’s daughter, someone’s lover, someone’s mother, had not even glanced back at the agony she had inflicted.

Evil isn’t found in the depths of some fiery inferno or in the conniving mind of some corporate executive. Evil is in the thoughtlessness of everyday life. Evil is in our indifference to the suffering of others.

So, the next time you decide to feel sorry for yourself and allow your plight as a woman, or an ethnic minority or whatever other crutch you want to use excuse yourself from being responsible for your own life, just remember the cockroach and the life lesson it taught me… Whenever you feel the weight of the world is too much to bear, just keep kicking.