I hate parasites. I hate them about as much as anybody could hate anything in the abstract sense. Abstract in that “parasites” are a broad class of organisms that take many forms. Most people are only truly able to hate in a personal way, when they are grievously wronged by somebody specific, they can “hate”, but most lack the capacity to hate an idea or a broad category of things. Hate, true hate, requires an intellect capable of understanding deep abstractions and possibly subtle connections. Most living organisms are not capable of hate, they act, they can aggress, they can fear, but they cannot hate. 

Only humans of higher orders can hate ideas, concepts, people they have never met, teach and pass on hate to their children, and act upon hate. Kai Murros said, “without hate for injustice, there can be no justice.” GLR said If you do not hate all that threatens what you love, then love is an empty catchphrase for cowards. 

 I truly hate parasites. 

I was living in a crummy apartment with crummy neighbors who had a number of animals that were not well cared for. They moved out, I think involuntarily, when they left and took those sad creatures with them, they left behind a drove of fleas. They left behind parasites. 

I'm sure many traveled to their new home on their clothes and the pets. But many were left in the now empty apartment unit next to mine. Without warm-blooded hosts to feed on, they soon plotted to migrate to my apartment. I had always known of the unsanitary conditions of my neighbors, so I would routinely spray all of the corners where the walls met the floors with pesticide, to create a hopefully unpassable barrier between myself, my pets, and the parasites that dwelled one wall away.

With no food in the next apartment over, the fleas became desperate, they began to find ways in under the walls, many died traveling through the pesticide on the floorboards, I was cleaning up their vile carcasses daily. But the fleas only became more determined. They found new ways in, somehow through the pipes that connected the units. They crawled over the dead bodies of their comrades lying in poison to make their way to my unit.

They were relentless. 

I battled them daily. Killing them on sight. Laying traps in the form of bowls filled with water and dish soap and a light overhead in the darkness, to draw them in and drown them overnight. I would wake up, flush their bodies, lay more poison, caulk any spaces I found where they could find safe passage. I too became relentless. As their numbers grew with their desperation and hunger, my hatred of them so too would elevate.  

Eventually, they tunneled in and found my two older cats I had adopted. A brother and sister. The brother is much larger and stronger, he's less furtive around humans than his sister. Both had been abused and lived a rough life before finding a permanent home with me. The fleas knew the sister was smaller and weaker and less likely to have a human notice the flea onslaught feeding on her blood. They chose the weaker cat to attack, nearly ignoring the stronger of the two. This is how parasites operate.

The fleas appeared to be gone, little did I know they were now devouring my poor cat alive. 

Less than a week since the neighbors left, I noticed the little cat crying for help, something very strange for her as she's usually rather reclusive, only coming out at night. I immediately picked her up and found the fleas crawling over her body. The hungry parasites, unable to feed on each other, picked my helpless cat to bleed to death. I rushed her to the emergency vet, she had a blood transfusion, and eventually fully recovered. I took the other cat out of the apartment, gave him a flea bath and treatment, then left the apartment for good. My sweet little rescue was going to be murdered by these godforsaken blood-suckers. A creature that produces nothing of value, does nothing for the ecosystem, has no aesthetic worth, is nothing but a parasite in every sense of the word.

Then I thought more about the fleas and how they might have viewed the conflict between us. First, they would accuse me of being hostile to them before I knew them, after all, I laid down poison and traps on the borders of my apartment with the specific intent to keep them out. Why would I do something so cruel? Poison them? Drown them? Squash them? They were simply hungry, the food in their apartment was gone, they were starving, they had children. These were “refugees” fleeing starvation, were they not? 

When I found fleas on my cats, I would remove them, but I would not put them outside, I would kill them. I always killed them.. They were sucking the life out of my beloved friends, but to them, they would tell the world I was trying to starve them to death, and they would be right. 

If parasites such as these fleas ran a media empire, there would be nothing but similar horror stories, painting men like me as the villain. Men like me, viciously removing them from their homes for “no reason at all”, starving them, poisoning them, fumigating them. Exterminating them. They might even produce films about these incidents. 

The films might even display an ordinary man like me with a couple of cats as the devil incarnate. The Orkin Man would be cast as the most evil being in all of history. Flea scholars would even write books on why it's a mental derangement to want to kill parasites, after all, they are just trying to eat, what kind of monster would murder a group of beings for trying to feed themselves? But the fleas would never tell you how they feed. The movies and news stories would never tell you of the poor, warm-blooded animals being eaten alive, to death, by flea infestations, or being poisoned by a tick-borne disease. All that would of course be ignored, perhaps even dismissed as an "anti-parasite conspiracy theory". 

But you and I? You and I know the truth. And for knowing what they are truly like, to see their behavior so intimately, I will always hate the parasite.