A startled rabbit that with a kick of its paws disappears behind a cloud of sparkling snow is different from a snake that warms his coiled body beneath a heap of leaves. No photographer, no news reporter, no professional zoologist has yet seen Wessie, the snake that is haunting the city of Westbrook.
Whether Wessie is 300 miles away or lurking under the brush at the end of our lot, he can be seen only with the eye of imagination. And the manner in which we imagine Wessie depends on our view of the world and man, not the news.
Wessie is a creature that slithered off the pages of a lurid horror novel and inhabits a shadow land between fiction and reality. Just as horror novels offer scenes of pain and degradation as matter for enjoyment, the public mind has transformed Wessie from a lethal beast into a subject of laughter around the water cooler. Desensitized by horror novels, horror films, violent video games and prize fighting, the heart is numbed and the mind loses its ability to perceive evil. Thus, Wessie remains invisible, and the pain and suffering of our fellow man — which ought to call forth compassion and a prompt effort to help — become a matter of indifference.
That some people find snakes sympathetic, even alluring, surely has a deeper reason than a mere attraction to what is strange and exotic. Whatever can be said in favor of snakes, they remain the symbol of the error that has plagued mankind from the beginning. That error is, according to our greatest philosophers and the teachings of the world’s monotheistic religions, man’s inclination to bend the truth to fit his own ends. Just as a snake requires a daily diet of innocent creatures, man may use his fellow man as a means to an end or, worse, make him an object of prey, while offering the most plausible reasons to justify his actions.
Fed with envy, anger and ambition, the malice in the human heart will lay dormant for a while, gathering strength, then leap out in an unexpected and frightening form. A case in point is the recent campaign for the presidency. Conservatives make the cruel claim that one candidate may be suffering from a horrible disease or a host of diseases, each more viler than the last. Progressives bite back, claiming the opposing candidate is aged and tottering and mentally unstable. Both sides then take up the same chant and join in a chorus that the opposing candidate already has one foot in the grave.
This is a particularly cold and inhuman form of mirror-gazing. No man or woman escapes illness and death, and such pronouncements regarding the health of others merely reflect our own uncertainty and fears regarding our mortality. In our eagerness to win, we cast aside the warmth and charity we owe the worst of our enemies by virtue of the fact that they too are vulnerable and human.
Closer to home, here in Maine, one lawmaker makes a biting remark, and his political opponent bites back with unbridled anger. In the end there is no winner, merely a wounded public.
This, then, is the snake among us, the reason why we neither perceive Wessie nor respond properly to the danger the giant beast poses.
A Maine where people keep giant snakes as pets and then casually let them wander off into the woods is not the Maine that once prided itself on the innocence of its natural setting. Mainers once boasted that no poisonous creature lurks in our fields and forests, neither black widow spider nor rattlesnake. But this is a new Maine, with different standards for what is socially and politically acceptable. Just as St. Patrick once chased the snakes from Ireland, we are in desperate need of someone to drive the malice from our hearts.
Fritz Spencer of Old Town is the former editor of the Christian Civic League RECORD.