Culling the Herd

by Jeff Smith

I’m sure he won’t like to hear this. My friend Alan is the reason why my life has gone the way it has gone. It is somewhat indirect but, as most things that are catalysts, it is the seed that brings forth the flower.

He is a good guy, Alan. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of him by telling this story of his remark and it’s subsequent role in my life. The path I have chosen. He would not agree with the things I do now because of his remark but he won’t really know until he reads this and by then it won’t matter anyway.

It was a night at the movies. I don’t recall the movie but it was some art house flick my friend always wanted to see. You know the sort of indecipherable arty kind of flick that gets shown in a second rate theater with really bad seats and not enough heat. I think they assume the people are there for the artiness and are willing to put up with the pain to be enlightened. It has to be that because you pay the same price for a ticket there as you do for the really nice theater with great sound and stadium seating so you don’t have to cram your legs up in to your chin and look at the head of the guy in front of you. Same damn ticket price.

Anyway, I am there with my girlfriend and he with his. His girlfriend is one of those arty kind of chicks. All dressed in black and pierced eyebrow and from what he tells me even more than that if you know what I mean. He met her at the art school he goes to. I think he goes there to get the arty chicks. They all seem to be similar and intense, with that freaky tattooed and pierced thing he seems to get a kick out of. I like the professional ladies. I like the ones in suits, the ones that have a job and don’t want to get all hung up on what I’m doing cause they don’t have a job. Forget those art school chicks with nothing better to do but sit around worrying about me. My girlfriend works in an office downtown and she wears a suit and does the office thing and she pretty much leaves me alone most of the time. His girlfriend and he have the worst fights and she is always saying where were you and what were you doing and all that shit. I just don’t have time for that. What a fucking mess, but he likes them like that.

I am forgetting the story. Well, we were out to this movie. We are walking down the street, heading from dinner to the little movie house a few blocks away. Now, if you live in a city of any size you will surely have experienced what we experienced as we walked along that night. It seemed like every ten feet or so there was some bedraggled homeless person asking for change. Now me, I just ignore them. Why should I waste my time talking to them, saying hello to them, or even saying no to them. They are interrupting my travels with their begging. It sucks that you can’t just have a nice evening out without having to have every homeless fuck out there asking to get a hand on some of your hard earned dollars for nothing. I have some respect for those guys out there, running around with their carts, picking up bottles and cans, making a living for themselves. They are at least trying to help themselves, trying to make good and pick themselves up from their poverty. These other people, they are just worthless. But Alan, he smiles at them and sometimes gives them money. He is like that, the art school guy, the softy. He has always been a softy, ever since I first met him in grade school. You can’t fault a guy for that.

So, after about the fiftieth guy asks us to spare some change I could see that Alan’s soft side had worn thin. It was kinda funny really, watching him lose his normal nice side and start to get bitter. I had my mind made up already about them but Alan was troubled with it himself. I was hoping that he was finally coming around to my point of view. His next comment, after we had passed another particularly sad specimen of a homeless person, was the point I have been trying to get to all this time. Sorry if I tend to digress. This one comment was the one that altered my life forever. It set me on the path to all the things I have become.

The homeless guy we passed wasn’t looking too good. He was really filthy. I mean he had obviously shit and pissed himself a few times already. He smelled like a portajohn after a long sunny summer holiday weekend in the park. I’ve had to use one after some sort of walkathon. Damn it was nasty! Anyway, he had matted hair, torn clothes, face covered in dirt and what looked like dried puke in his scraggly beard. He was also hacking like a madman. He could barely ask us for change between his hacking coughs.

And here is what my friend said that was so momentous. The spark that set me on the way to my work, my project. I like to think that he was my muse, setting me off on a path toward my master work of art. I have always wanted to thank him for it but I knew he wouldn’t like it, in fact would hate me for it. He would not understand it and would be mortified to learn that he was the one that sparked it all.

What he said was,

"Tuberculosis, it culls the herd."

He said it with such derision I couldn’t believe it. He was always going on and on about the homeless and the compassion you need to feel for them. How they are just down on their luck or worse yet, have mental illnesses that they are not getting treatment for. You know the same old poor folks that just can’t help themselves kind of thing. I was shocked that I heard that tone come from him. I of course laughed and played the comment over in my mind and then laughed again. What a comment!

At this point I hadn’t had my true epiphany yet regarding this one little phrase. I was just repeating it over and over in my head and thinking about how funny it was. It wasn’t until quite a while later that I had the epiphany. Mostly what happened with that phrase was, I told it to others and got a laugh out of it. It was a nice joke around the office. Some people that are like Alan, sensitive and stuff, they didn’t think it was so funny but I couldn’t stop laughing about it. I even began to make up other phrases of a similar vein that I would say to myself whenever I would think of a new one. For example,

"Heroin, it culls the herd."

Or

"AIDS, it culls the herd."

Or

"Toxic waste, it culls the herd."

Etc.

Then I really began to think about what it meant. What does it mean to cull the herd? What does that really mean?

I began to see the world from a real Darwinian perspective. The survival of the species kind of thing. What role do those things really play in the life of man, of the world? I began to realize that they were not helping as much as they should. They were culling the herd. They were taking away some of the bad animals in the herd that is humanity. However, they were not taking enough of them. Mother nature was not up to the job. She was incapable of dealing with the magnitude that humanity had become. Her methods were good for the old days. Not anymore. Because humans have surpassed her abilities to cope.

She needed some help.

© Jeff Smith 2001