Artwork courtesy of Hannah Allocco
It arrived to me in a dream, the Earth in darkness; crops shriveled, the ground suffocated by soot. The sun itself enclosed by insects so life would be lived in perpetual shadow.
It may not be cloudy, but it always rains. Shards of red leapfrog off the ceiling in irregular arcs. They hit the ground but do not dissipate. Bodies weightless like droplets of water accumulate on the concrete, a center of sap encased in tree bark. We returned to campus after a year and a half, things couldn’t be exactly the same. Littered like confetti on the sidewalks are lantern bugs in too great a quantity to destroy. As with much of the events of this strange decade, we just had to accept it. The pretty, intrusive, stupid insects landing on our arms, sitting next to us, indifferent to our presence. On the sidewalk like pieces of chewed gum, or between layers of glass doors, the spotted lanternflies are practically part of our campuses’ fabric. One imagines exterminating the mobs with a flamethrower yet more likely trods their way back to their dorm exhaustedly, resigned to the insect’s overwhelming presence.
A threat to our natural surroundings they may be, yet the lanternflies put up a convincingly unassuming appearance lying lazily on the sidewalks, scarcely bothering the students commuting by them. In a decade so tumultuous, the threat of insects sucking the life out of crops seems illusory. Their presence is disastrous on a macro level yet a mild nuisance on the personal. The urgent need to kill these vampiric beasts does not captivate us emotionally. The consequences are intangible, their presence not overtly horrifying. Yet the sheer number of lanternflies flooding Livingston campus is a disconcerting, discouraging image confronting us every day.
The commute to 9 AM classes, where students are sporadically present; the horizon is perfectly still except for the twitching bodies cutting through the air with the force of their appendages. Dead or alive they indiscriminately reappear day-after-day, any progress in eliminating them erased. Unlike the Busch geese or Livingston coyote, the lanternfly is inescapable across all campuses. They are encased into the Rutgers experience. Are we simply too willing to learn to live with encroaching problems? Have we accepted the lanternfly as a permanent pillar of our lives? The great wave looming over us, crashing repeatedly. Perhaps it is a cosmic threat, bigger than us, incapable of control. Or perhaps our collective resistance can counteract the latest terror inflicted on our lives, rather than accepting it as the status quo.