Ants

If you have ever lived in the deep South you probably know about sugar ants. They are little red ants that can smell sugar, honey, and anything sweet from seemingly miles around. They live in the woodwork and under the tile floors of homes. They come out whenever you're not looking and will glom onto anything not protected. If you've ever lived in Texas you've probably heard the legendary stories about women who have baked a fresh pie or a cake and put it in a bowl in a basin of water to keep the ants off, only to come back later and find the ants have crawled up the wall across the ceiling to a point directly overhead and dropped like paratroopers down onto the cake.

I lived in south Texas for over four years and I never saw anything like that happen, but I know about sugar ants. Once I had moved into a brand new apartment building and never thought that a new place with new cupboards and new paint could fall prey to sugar ants so quickly, but I was wrong. I bought a box of cereal and a carton of Chips Ahoy cookies. I had the cereal for breakfast one day, and the cookies for snacks later on. The next morning when I got the cereal box it was covered with sugar ants. So were the Chips Ahoy cookies. I learned right away the value of tupperware.

We have an ant problem here in our apartment. A multiple ant problem. We have these black ants that are about a sixteenth of an inch long. They usually come out when the lights are off, but if there is any fruit on the counter, especially bananas, they are all over it at any time. They're fast too. I'll bet if they were human size they'd be moving a hundred miles an hour. But that's not all. We also have these little red ants that are about half the size of the black ants. They are everywhere. They come crawling over my little desk in the bedroom and run around on the computer, even getting under the keys. They're in the bathroom all over the sink and on any spilled toothpaste or open tube. They've even taken up residence in the couch, and of course they are all over the kitchen counter anytime of day.

I have two six foot high book shelves side by side, the put together yourself kind that you get with laminated wood from Lowes or wherever. The lamination is all finished and polished, but the tops of the side pieces are just rough and not varnished. I have books on the top shelves and one day as I picked a book out to read, I noticed ants all over the bottom of it, in the binding, and crawling up into the pages. A closer examination found they were all over the bottom of all the books. When they started to scatter I at first thought they were little spiders. They were all carrying little white things. Then as I started smashing them I realized those were eggs. They had come up out of that lamination and were trying to set up nests in my books. By the time I removed the books and smashed all those ants the top of the bookshelf was wet from all those broken little eggs.

There's a third kind, a little brown almost microscopic kind, that run camouflaged along the grout on the countertop tiles until they get close to food and then spring surprise attacks. These are probably the least obnoxious simply because you can hardly see them, but they are there.

I decided to go on a campaign to eradicate the apartment of ants. I have sprayed, wiped the counters with Clorox, put everything into tupperware, and smashed every ant running loose that I can get my fingers on. It's no use. No matter how many I destroy, the survivors never run back into the woodwork or walls and tell the others its dangerous, don't come out. They just keep coming. I keep smashing, but one day not long ago I read that the experts, whoever they are, estimate that there are about 1.7 million ants for every human being on earth. I probably kill a hundred or two every day. In other words, I'm hardly making a dent in my share of the ant menace in the world. They are persistent little vermin. No matter what the odds they never give up. They keep coming back to the same old thing even if they get smashed every time.

They remind me of liberals. They never quit spouting their failed socialist doctrines. No matter what the truth is, it never prevails against their mode of thinking. Ferguson, Missouri for example. No matter how many times they are smashed in debate, and no matter how many times their policies put into practice fail, they keep coming back with the same debunked ideas. They never learn, never grow, never improve themselves, and yet they never go away. They are relentless and the result is BHO in the White House, obamacare, 18 trillion dollars in debt, a border crisis, a constitutional crisis, and myriad scandals. Yet they keep coming back touting the same stupid failed socialist mantra.

Solomon said, "Go to the ant thou sluggard" (Proverbs 6:6). Conservatives would do well to take this advice and become as relentless in our pursuit of the truth as the liberals are in their efforts to pervert it. It has only been six weeks since the resounding midterm election victory and the conservative movement is already being sold out by RINOs, liberals in Republican clothing. Now we're already talking about the next presidential election and the first announced candidate out of the box is a RINO, Jeb Bush, who agrees with BHO on an open border and amnesty, and favors the hideous Common Core program for education.

The problem with conservatives is we tend to sit back and let things go until they reach a breaking point and then we get energized to save the country. But when the elections are over, even after a big victory, we tend to go back into our cubbyholes and let liberals take control of events. We need to learn the lesson from those relentless liberals and become relentless ourselves, never resting, never stopping, never letting liberals, whether Democrat or RINO, gain the upper hand. Unless we learn from the ants and become as active and relentless in pursuit of conservative ideals, we will never win our country back. A good place to start would be replacing John Boehner as the Speaker of the House.