There's a whole other side to spiders just like there is with most anything. They are part of our pest patrol in the garden. They go about their job without our notice, so that we are seldom aware of the role they play. The only members of the arachnids (spider family) that cause problems for gardeners are the mites. The rest are good citizens of the garden who make their living feeding on insects that feed on plants we like to grow.
After the shock of the horrible events of Sept. 11, my grief has come, as it always does, to the place of anger. Anger needs a target and a whole group of likely ones live around me and have raised my curiosity in the past because I don't know them, nor they me. I recognize them mostly by the covering their women wear and that they keep mostly to themselves and speak mostly another language. It would be so easy to hate them, but it won't work. The target must be guilty, or at least demonstrably bad to give me the relief of hating them. If not, then my grief will only be multiplied by my guilt. These immigrants are like immigrants who came in the past. They are trying to make lives in a place far different from what they had known. Everything is unfamiliar and they have to learn a lot in a short time to manage. Most of them work very hard and do jobs that many Americans consider both low paying and less desirable. Home and family are as important to them as they are to me. I have to live with myself too, so I need to remember that because a group of fanatics did such a horrible thing does not mean that these new members of our community are guilty of anything.
So, I look instead at the spider, diligently, carefully catching my garden enemies and living beside me, but not with me, in peace. Those people I see, who are not me or my friends or neighbors are friends and neighbors of other Americans and, with their quiet diligence are doing their part in the fabric of our great patchwork of a culture and are, likely, in as much pain as I. The pain of being stigmatized for something not of your making has scarred many people for the whole of human history and I look at the spider and see how it is.
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