“If you live in a country that provides
comprehensive social programs (read: everywhere but here) I have to explain the
connotation of that word “welfare”. It is said like the lowest and most disgusting
thing ever. People here say “she’s on welfare” they way they’d say “she kills
baby seals”.”—Paige
Lucas-Stannard (from an essay called I’m
a Welfare Mom published on everydayfeminism.com)
I
didn’t understand what it meant to receive government assistance when I was a
child, and by the time I did, we were off of it, or nearly. I was thankful my
family was being helped in less public ways—free school lunches, court ordered and garnished child support. My mother was and is a fighter and is curiously
fascinated by the Praying Mantis, which seemed important as I listened to a Radiolab show called Colors on my treadmill.
About the time President Obama was reelected, a girl I knew from junior high school posted a Facebook status that
likened government welfare programs to the National Park Service and welfare
recipients to wild animals. The meme had a title, which was something like “A
Lesson in Irony: Please Don’t Feed the Animals.” Her point, and that of the
meme’s— which I saw replicated over and over on social media—was that the US
government is fostering a dependence (as do campers who feed animals) on
handouts, leading to animals that will not care for themselves. It was the only
time I’ve engaged in a fight waged via the Internet. It ended with my
promise to eat granola and watch Jon Stewart from the backseat of my rainbow
stickered car.
*
The
eye of the Mantis shrimp is such that he is able to see an object with three
different parts of the same sphere. Instead of two cones (a dog) or three (a
human), the Mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receiving portals, the most
complicated visual system of any animal by a factor of two. His rainbow does
not then follow ours, red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo, violent—it consists of colors we cannot
imagine.
When
I heard this on on Radiolab, I memorized it and used
the information to write a bad poem. I liked the sounds of the hired choir as
they speculated in song about the shrimp’s rainbow: super duper ultra violet, very ultra violet, ultra ultra violet,
violet, and so on. What a luxury, I thought.
*
There
was a time when I believed in God and a woman called me an angel of him, that
is, you are an angel of God. I was
sixteen and charitable, I took pride in that, the very idea of being charitable. Part of the
school-hosted community canned food drive, my faculty driver and I brought in
box after box of canned spam and oranges, a Christmas tree, a turkey. A bag of
dog food, some books. I’d never seen anyone cry like that, weeping so openly
amidst the smell of an old apartment, an apartment I knew to be, well, poor.
*
Stowed
away in hovels and holes, the Mantis shrimp does not leave home, save to feed
or relocate, and 20 or so times to breed—as dictated by the tides and thus the
ability to perceive the phases of the moon. After, depending on the species
(which range from finger to forearm in size) the eggs are either kept within
the burrow or carried around under the mother’s tail until the time of
hatching. Often, these couples are monogamous. They are good mothers, these
shrimp, and they are making good homes.
*
Now I am 27 and it has been eleven years since I was an angel, ten since I
stopped believing in God, and I wonder what became of that woman and her family. I
wondered so much that, over Christmas, my boyfriend and I volunteered to drive
high school students from the school I attended to the lists of homes they’d
collected and for whom they’d prepared boxes of food. Macee and Mandy sat in
the back of the Buick I was driving and comment on the awesomeness of the
shocks. They sung when Justin Bieber came on the radio, and laughed at the
mildly inappropriate jokes my boyfriend and I made. It’s been so long. It seems
good to be young. None of the addresses were on Fourth Street.
Our
first house was a few blocks away from the school, and the girls giggled
nervously as they approached the door. There were two families living there,
four parents, more children then I could count. On the stairs there was a boy
who was maybe sixteen. The girls whispered, he
is in my English class.
*
Mantis
shrimp are named for their weapon, a sort of arm similar to that of the Praying
Mantis insect, and are found in multiple oceans, in many homes. These shrimp
are grouped into two categories—spearers and slashers, so named for the way
they attack their prey. Though beautiful, the shrimp are largely considered violent predators. In Cantonese cuisine, they are the pissing shrimp, squirting streams of water when lifted. These
shrimp are survivors though, and fighters, capable of breaking the glass of an
aquarium in a single strike.
*
All
of this to say, and simply, too simply, what I should have said then, Dear Michelle, please remember —if we are to compare humans to animals let it be the Mantis shrimp,, in our
shared ability to fight and overcome. And to other animals--the ability to demonstrate compassion, to express
empathy toward others, and Michelle, it is never who you think, and the colors are still beautiful and, well, maybe you aren't, but I’m happy to help a Mantis
shrimp—
And I’m happy to be one too.
*
Heather Hamilton is currently
a nonfiction candidate in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, where
she serves as Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Sonora
Review.
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