I Don't Even Know What to Put Here, I'm so Upset

Honestly, it's like people go out of their ways to disgust me.

Today at work, there was a giant moth just outside the door. As I'm an animal person, I thought it was super cool. When I showed it to the other girls, they all thought it was gross. One even demanded we kill it. I, of course, refused. In an effort to keep one of them from acting on such violent tendencies, I moved it into a bush where it would be a bit safer.

All of this prompted a few of the girls to talk about just how much they hate insects and spiders. A few of them talked about how they pull the lighting ends off fireflies and stick them on their fingers, or make bracelets, and other horrific stuff. They've done it since childhood, and still have a great time. One girl even said that she likes to hit fireflies with a baseball bat when they light up so that she can watch them go flying and crash to the ground.

And I was the only one completely horrified and upset. I actually had to fight back tears.

I mean, I get it. I'm weird. I like bugs and spiders and all that stuff. Other people don't, and that's fine by me. You don't have to LIKE them. You just can't TORTURE them, or KILL them just for sport, or because they're "icky".

That's one of the quickest ways to set me off. An animal is an animal. It doesn't have to be cute or cuddly to be worth treating well. If it's alive, it deserves the same amount of respect as anything else. A bug is just as important to the ecosystem as a tiger, but people think bugs are gross and ugly, so it doesn't matter if we kill it.

Ugh. Seriously. This whole thing put me in an awful mood for the rest of the day. I just keep thinking, "Well, maybe we should rip THEIR legs off and see what they think about that". Which would not be good. It could land me in jail.

One person at work understood where I was coming from. Sam, the kitchen manager, agrees that all creatures are precious. Like me, he'll pick up the spiders and moths and whatever other creatures get inside and send them back outside.

That's another thing. One of the girls who talked about ripping the abdomens off fireflies was kind of worried that I hated her. She kept saying that she was a good person, a nice person, she just didn't like bugs. But when we saw that moth, she was one of the ones saying to kill it. And later, she was like "I was just saying that because I knew you were an animal person, I was just playing around."

Like, what? You think you're a nice person, but go around TRYING to upset people? And then you're confused and hurt when they don't take to that well and tell you as much?

I don't know. Things like this make me seriously wish that most people would just disappear.

People wonder how others can be so cruel to other people - rape, murder, etc. I don't wonder at all. If we can treat other creatures so awfully, why wouldn't we treat each other that way? As long as you dehumanize your victim (when it comes to people), you're just pulling the lights off fireflies.