It is a vivid memory from my childhood: my two older brothers found a wasp nest under an eave of our house on 42nd Street in Pear Ridge, and gleefully announced their plan to destroy it. “Before they can sting anyone,” they said. Then they were out of the house before Mama could say, “Wait until your Daddy gets home.”

Holding a blazing torch under a wasp nest is a good way to kill most of the wasps and destroy the nest. When the nest is tucked up under the overhang of your roof, it is also possibly a good way to burn your house down, but thinking ahead about possible unintended consequences is not a strong point of young boys. 

But it seemed to me that Pete and Jimmy were always doing exciting things like this, so I headed out the screen door right after them. I heard Mama say, “Stay back or you’ll get stung!” and “Don’t let the door slam!”  

“You stay back out of the way, or you’ll get stung,” one of them said. I readily agreed. I didn’t want to help, and risk getting stung, I just wanted to watch. I watched them tie some rags on the end of a cane pole, douse them in kerosene, and light them. The torch blazed, and they lifted it up under the nest. 

I recall very clearly what happened then: almost all of the wasps shriveled up and fell, but one got away from the fire. It flew a straight line — a “bee line,” you could say — right at me! I felt the pain from his sting, but more than that, I felt betrayed — the wasp had behaved unfairly! After all, it wasn’t ME who burned the nest. Where was justice? Where was fair play?

Like all children, I had begun to internalize the values that my parents and siblings modeled for me. 

“Misbehave, and you get punished.” “Be a good boy, and you’ll be rewarded.” “Leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone.” Such tidbits of wisdom were guidelines for avoiding unpleasant consequences, for gaining some control over what happened in my little world.  

Soon to be added to such basic ideas as those were other, more universal ideas about life. The Golden Rule, for example, added the element of kindness and generosity to my internal rulebook. The sources of input also expanded. In addition to my family, ideas about life came from the church, my school, and my circle of friends. 

I learned that America is great, and that it is special among nations, mainly because of the guarantee of personal freedom, equality, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Our country, I was taught, was analogous to the good guy in a white hat in the western movies we saw at the theater on Saturday. You don’t lie, you don’t cheat, and you don’t start fights or pick on someone smaller than you. And even if things look bad, you win in the end.

Just as that single wasp years ago challenged my expectation of fair play and introduced me to a competing reality of life, much of what I have learned over the years, and accepted as truth, has been challenged. While I have learned that few things are quite as simple as I first thought, I still believe in the basic validity of those lessons. So when I hear that America has mistreated prisoners, killed innocent civilians, and bullied other nations, I process that information against a mental backdrop of America The Beautiful, the Good Guys. Even Good Guys can look bad sometimes, but that doesn’t change their basic nature.

It is this predisposition to the values of our youth that made it hard for some of us to accept the truth about terrorists. Why would anyone want to destroy us? Is it really true that many people do not value freedom, but instead want to force their way of life on others? That goes against our core values of freedom of conscience, and the right of each individual to choose his own path. 

What good is it, we reason, to gain converts to any religion by force?  If your belief system cannot stand the light of truth, and relies upon the sword or gun rather than its appeal to each man or woman’s heart and soul, is it truly a worthy system? If it relies upon fear to hold it together, can it evoke the best qualities of its leaders?

Amid the recent uproar over the pope’s speech in Germany, in which he quoted remarks made several hundred years ago, there have been many incidents of violence by Muslims over the world. The pope has issued several explanations and an apology, hoping to calm the troubled waters. I am reminded of something that happened several years ago, to a well-known comedian who liked to make jokes about Italians and mafia violence. A woman came up to him and said something like, “We Italians are NOT violent! And if you don’t stop making jokes about Italians and the mafia, something really bad is gonna happen to you!”

Gene Dammon of Port Neches is a contributing writer to the Port Arthur News. His e-mail address is: gene-san@sbcglobal.net.