The Failure of DDT

Mosquitos are a pets, aren't they? Oops, I meant pest.

DDT was such a good idea. That is, if it hadn't threatened every other creature above it in the food chain.

Humans have long killed off creatures that were a threat, or were just plain stupid. Dodo birds, passenger pigeons, buffaloes, pumas, lions, tigers, T-Rexes... you get the picture.

Well, I think it is about time we took out the mosquito--except this time, we won't do it by threatening their water supply. We'll take out their food supply. Us.

I mean, if farmers have long preserved their crops by genetically altering them to contain poisons that will kill off their pests, why can't we inject pesticides fatal to mosquitos into our own bloodstreams and knock off those little buggers. They'd all be dead within a couple of years, for sure.

We are what we eat, aren't we? If we can genetically mess with our food, poisoning it and chemicaling it and whatever else we do to it, and we're still alive, even taller than ever, surely we can mess with our bloodstreams. Our blood isn't us. It's just the thing inside of us that moves stuff around. The circula-whatever system.

Are we really the body? If you took our brains out, and safely connected all the nerve thingies to another body, we would live inside that body, would we not? So injecting ourselves with pesticides really wouldn't harm us--it would just harm our host.

And even if this great idea fails and we all die--at least we can take the mosquito down with us. Because revenge is all that matters. (Stupid mosquito bite on my knee.)


"Politics, n: Poly 'many' + tics 'blood-sucking parasites.'" (Larry Hardiman)