What’s wrong with people? These are all my friends.

More about What’s wrong with people? These are all my friends.

Now, I am not a man to pick a fight with the Almighty’s landscaping crew, but I do say there is a powerful lot of foolishness going around regarding what lives in the damp basement of nature. My neighbors—fine, upright citizens, every last one of them, with waistlines stretching toward prosperity and silk hats that cost more than a good mule—will go into high hysterics if they happen to flip over a rotten log and see a respectable black beetle going about his lawful business.They scream like a steam whistle with a turnip stuck in it. They use words you only say when the riverboat hits a snag at midnight. It is a pure scandal, how folks turn up their noses at the quiet, industrious populace that pays no rent and asks nothing of society save a little damp shade.You lift a damp log, or an old mossy tree stump that has been sitting there since the administration of General Washington, and what do you find? You find society, plain and simple. You find the night-shift union: slugs making slow, honest progress across the loam; toads sitting there like fat aldermen contemplating a municipal bond; and bats hanging upside down, meditating on the vanity of the sun. They do not owe the bank a dime. They do not run for office on a platform of falsehoods. They just attend to their own damp affairs in the dark.And yet, my friends will holler for the salt shaker or reach for a heavy stick. It is unchristian, I call it.Moreover, people forget the vital statistics of this great terrestrial sphere. A fellow with more spectacles than sense—back there in the roaring 1920s, an Austrian doctor by the name of Julius Wagner-Jauregg—figured out the arithmetic of creation. He didn't turn up his nose at the terrible, creeping things of this world; instead, he took the most bone-shaking swamp-fever misery known to geography, malaria, and used it to boil advanced syphilis right out of the human brain. He knew that the grand engine of life runs on invisible roommates and quiet freeloaders.He sat down with the book of nature and calculated that about two-thirds of all living species on this green earth are, strictly speaking, parasitic. Think on that for a minute. Two-thirds! That means the grand engine of life does not run on poetry, or high ideals, or polite handshakes at the county fair. It runs on worms and germs. We owe our very existence, our lungs, our cabbages, and our Sunday sermons to things that make their living by dropping in uninvited and staying for dinner under the skin.If you took away the germs and the worms, this whole world would grind to a halt like a cheap clock in a snowstorm. We would have no soil worth planting a turnip in, no cycle to the seasons, and no humility to keep man from thinking he built the stars with his own two hands.So I say, next time you see a slimy thing under a rock, don't reach for a brick. Take off your hat. Bow a little low to the creatures that saved our minds and our soils.