The Unwanted Arrival
RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 6
July came in hot, and my whole country is in love with itself again. Fireworks, flags, the story we tell every year about who made it here and why. I've been listening to that story my whole life, and I'm going to tell you something. I think the rat is the most American animal there is.
Not the eagle, or the turkey. Not the horse, the dog, or the cow standing in its pasture eating the same grass its great-grandmother ate. Those are the animals we chose. Those are the ones we brought with intention. The rat, however, is the animal we did not want. The one that showed up anyway.
Nobody invited the rat to this continent. It came in the hold of a ship, eating the stores, fouling the water, existing exactly the way something does when it's not supposed to be there at all. Every port in America spent two hundred years trying to kill it. Every farmer, every grocer, every household with a larder to protect. We laid poison. We set traps. We declared it vermin.
The rat stayed anyway. It ate what we threw away. It took shelter in the spaces we didn't want. It thrived on the scraps and the margins and the things we had no use for. It asked for nothing. It was not welcome. So it learned to want nothing but what it could find and take on its own. That's the animal version of everyone who got off a boat with three dollars and a name nobody could pronounce.
The rat didn't come here to be loved. It came here because this place will let an unwanted thing live, if it's stubborn enough. If it's small enough to fit through the cracks. If it’ll take the worst ground and make something out of it.
I grew up in a van. We were not invited to the places we parked. My mother stole cheese off a rich man's table because the rich man had more than he could eat and we had nothing. That's not the story we tell on the Fourth of July. But it's the story that made me. It's the story that made a lot of us. You come here unwanted, you find the cracks, and you work with what falls through.
That's the rat's whole biography in my country. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter. That math works out because the rat is an animal that has nothing to lose and nowhere to go but forward. It came here as an accident. It stayed as a fact of nature. And now, two hundred and fifty years later, we're finally asking it for something. To find a place at the table.
The cow is American too, in the way that money is American. We built it. We bred it. We put it where we wanted it and fed it what we decided it should eat. We own every part of it all the way down to the shape of its stomach. The cow is colonialism with a tail.
The rat is something different. The rat colonized us. We brought it here and it beat us. We spent centuries trying to kill it and it learned our buildings better than we did. It ate our grain. It raised its young in our walls. And every year we poison one and three more are already home. The rat did not ask permission. It found a crack and it moved in, and now it's so much a part of this country that we can't imagine the place without it, even though we still pretend we want it gone.
That's the true American story. The Fourth came and went this weekend, everybody lighting off fireworks and talking about the brave and the free. And I spent it thinking about the animal that didn't ask to come here and couldn't leave if it tried. The animal that took what we didn't want and made it work. The animal that is more American than any of us will ever be, because it actually did what we only talk about.
It came here with nothing. It stayed. It thrived. And now we're finally, finally, paying attention.
The milk is just the math. The rat is something else entirely. The rat is the proof that you can show up unwanted and still matter. You can take the worst ground and make it work. You can be small and dense and absolutely certain of yourself and change everything. You just have to refuse to apologize for existing.
That's the independence that matters. That's what's worth celebrating.
Stay bold, my friends.
– BigCrazyBaldhead