When the ants stop marching one by one...

It's summertime in the Lone Star State and the Rasberry Crazy ants are at it again. This time, they have turned their attacks on the Texas domesticated honey bee populations. For years they have been terrorizing the Tejas urban, suburban, and now rural landscape. These tiny ants seem largely resistant to all but the most toxic of pesticides allowing them to spread like wildfire.

It has recently been observed that these small ants will aggressively cannabilize other types of ants, even one's multiple times their own size. Recent reports describe them attacking and consuming entire colonies of fire ants, and ant previously defined as one of Texas' most dangerous insects. Breaking from the outdated forms of classical warfare, such as the method of marching in regimented lines, the Rasberry's have become known as the first ants to embrace guerilla warfare tactics. Their Human enemies have not yet been able to make sense of their new, more effective tactics, instead humans one handedly rationalize the recent attacks as crazy, unorganized, and erradic, but with the other hand pressure the state to label them, a top "pest" priority, which would be the insect equivalent of topping the F.B.I's Domestic Terrorist Threat list, just like the Elf, Alf, and other so called "Ecoterrorists" that currently claim the #1 spot on the F.B.I.'s List, these ants appear dedicated to destroying industrial civilization's most important infrastructures.

Last year, in the greater Houston area alone, they were responsible for millions of dollars in damage to the public works system. On a few occasions, with surprise attacks, they would swarm out of the tall grass thickets and into large electrical sub-station boxes. Within a matter of minutes they would successfully overload entire neighborhoods' electrical framework, leaving behind thousands powerless and important components non-repairable. The Rasberry's become most active during the sizzling August and September months and with every business and household blasting their air conditioning units at full throttle, there becomes no better time to cause blackouts in Texas.

Along with attacks on the larger electrical grid, they also make attacks on tertiary targets, such as smaller government and corporate computers also rendering them beyond repair. Other targets include automobiles, heavy farming and construction machinery, sewage pumps, and anything that may contain an expensive, delicate or intricate electrical system. These electrical systems seem to be their favored picks, and why not, in most machines and equipment, these components tend to be the most crucial, costly and fragile parts. Guerilla warfare states that when any resistance group is taking on much larger enemy targets, and in this case millions of times larger, that it becomes strategically fundamental to find a fulcrum, or leverage point, and the Rasberry crazy ants have done just that.

The relentless Texas drought, that is currently decreasing all industrial and agricultural production (in as much as the two can or should ever be separated), only seems to be aiding the intensity of the Rasberry forces. The most recent statistics verify that they now have an established presence in 11 Texas counties and are still growing rapidly. It is with this recent expansion, that they seem to have found their next leverage point, the domesticated honeybee.

Within the last few years, domesticated honeybee populations have become the most crucial link in sustaining Texas' farm and food production. Even taking in consideration the recent crisis of an extreme shortage in irrigatable water and annual rainfall, pollination is still the basis for maintaining any successfull harvest.

Texas, throughout its history has destroyed millions of acreage considered wilderness, rapidly converting it, to make room for the big businesses of cotton, corn, cattle, feed, and oil. Now, with the exception of a few designated wilderness areas, the much more manageable Texas farm and ranch lands stretch out in all directions, well beyond the seeable horizons. All of this has led to a population crash and almost extinction of the wild bee populations, leaving their domesticated cousins busily buzzing around attempting to pick up the tragic slack. The ageless homage of, "Everything's bigger in Texas!" although cliche, rings so very loud and true when describing bee farms across the state. In some of the world's largest bee farms, the busiest little Texas workers can be found laboring non-stop, around the clock. Just in Texas state production, honey, considered a secondary product of the busy bee industry, can be measured in the billions of pounds.

In the spirit of capitalist industry, Texas bee farms, or more honestly, Texas bee factory farms have become more in search of profits, then even the Texas-sized, evangelical, mega-church prophets. Having found cost cutting methods of cramming so many bees into each square inch, the bee farmers have comparatively made the otherwise disgusting KFC factory farm, chicken per square foot ratio, look like suburban sprowl. The all so densely populated bee hives began to look like a diaramic of the most overcrowded urban slum. Farpassing Bangkok, New Delhi, and Mexico City, these prefabricated uniform dwellings, tower to incredible heights and are so closely packed together that the bees sometimes have to squeeze by surrounding tenements to get their own housing unit.

The workerbee's daily conditions become comparable to those of Indonesian sweatshops and Latin American coffee and banana plantations. The factory farms become a place where living, flying, and loafing all become serious occupational hazards and the amount of dead workers surmount to numbers so despairing, that not even the cruelest C.I.A. funded dictator of S.O.A. trained death squad would fantasize about them. Like any good factory, or for that matter, any form of property including mines, forests, stocks, women and children, the only valuable measure is it's output. Desperate and miserable in their own living conditions, domesicated bees reveal an easy breaking point for industrial agriculture, it becomes no wonder the Rasberry crazy ants would pick them as their next target.

With only a slight advantage in group numbers, the ants are incredibly disadvantaged against the bees in weight, size, and mobility, but this doesn't stop them. Camouflaged under the raise of a friendly neighborhood ant, just passing by, quite a few Rasberry's are able to infiltrate their way into the megatropolis to surveying the enemies' infrastructure. Once enough ants are inside the massive complex, they signal for the rest to come out from hiding. In a spectacle far more spectacular than the Trojan Horse debackle, their friendly demeanor suddenly converts into a savage flood, as the rage of the wilderness is unleashed upon the prefabricated environment.

The bees fight back but because of domestication and selective genetic breeding for relative passivity, they don't stand a chance. The previously fortified honeycombs, now, are no more together than, if by chance, the U.S. Federal Reserve awoke one morning to find itself 4,000 miles away in the center of a fallujan neighborhood, or better yet, if it awoke to find itself a couple hundred miles away in the middle of West Baltimore's ghetto. Just like the ground corporate bail out of 2008, but on opposite day, each ant makes off with such a large amount of honey, that it comparatively makes a citi-group executive's bonus seem like monopoly money. So by the time the capitalist owner's find the battle scene, their hives are as ravaged as a collapsing ransacked Rome, after a final visit from the German tribe of Vandals. Tens of thousands of hives can now be counted in the hundreds. One factory farm attacked, in a week turns to five, in a month turns into forty, in a year one can only dream.

Interestingly enough, Rasberry crazy ants are not named after their favorite variety of vine-grown fruit, but instead, ironically, they are named after, no in honor of, one of their most enduring and hated enemies, Tom Rasberry. Good ol' Tom Rasberry is one of the leaders in this modern day, fear-mongering, McArthist, insecticidal witch hunt. Tom, a lowly exterminator by trade, now finds himself as the lead expert on the aggressive little ants. This has landed him employment as a part of a special force unit, a combined federal and state funded project, or more clearly seen as the bug's world equivalent to a post 911 government agency, his group no longer has the time to actively battle the ants, the only reason the group was established in the first place. Instead they spend their time traveling from Academic universities, to city and state agencies of all shapes and sizes, and even the occasional local neighborhood watch program (I wouldn't dare make this up), spreading unfounded and fear-filled propaganda in attempts to receive support, more specifically, additional funding. The primary interest to any bureacracy is the continuation of itself and Tom does this beautifully as he describes the ants invasion with a dreadfully slumbering tone, demanding his audiences to take the most immediate of actions, before the ants are able to spread anymore and ultimately cause unimaginable amounts of destruction to the state and possible the nation.

So it seems that a moral line the size of biblical proportions, okay maybe just Texas size, is currently being drawn in the sand. Soon, we will be forced to ask ourselves, "What side am I on?" Am I on the side of state and corporate interests, dillusionally demanding the complete eradication of this species before they destroy our most altruistic foundations, the American pillars of freedom, democracy, and profit? Or instead, am I on the side of the oppressed, the side of coming insurrection, the underdog, or in this case the under-ant? The united liberation front of Crazed Rasberry Armed Ant Forces vs. Industrial Civilization - honey craving, six legged guerilla sabatour extraordinairs or cancer causing, heart-stopping, bug dropping, radioactive insecticidal spray, 6 billion little David'd against one monolithic Goliath, but you know what they say about giants, The bigger they come the harder they fall.

Written from the Nueces County Jail

(Transcribed by Charity)