It Starts with One Black Widow
A fable for the times.
It came from the attic. It didn’t mean us any harm.
I almost walked right into the thing.
In the middle of the night, a black widow rappelled into our hallway and started making its way toward the living room. I trapped it in a jar. In the morning, I called our pest control company.
Do you know what the guy said to me?
“Are you sure it’s a black widow?”
“It’s really unlikely.”
That’s the kind of reaction intelligent women around the world have come to expect. It’s why I trapped the widow. So I sent photos. He said wow, it really was a black widow. He said he’d call back with treatment plans. He was almost certain that we were overreacting. It wasn’t a problem.
He never called back.
At this point, I decided to post about it online. What a great idea. Instantly, a dozen strangers all had expert opinions on what I should do.
They agreed I was overreacting. A black widow in your house? No big deal. So-and-so grew up with them everywhere. Just check your shoes each and every time you put them on. And your bed. And your closet. And your laundry. Grow up. Stop being so fragile and precious. Learn to live with widows.
Someone else consulted AI.
The AI told them the risk of death posed by black widow bites remained low, almost zero. You probably won’t die, as long as you get to a hospital fast enough. Only 33.5 percent of widow bites require medical treatment. Only 1.4 percent experience “life-threatening complications.” Only 1.4 percent.
Yet another person killed their subscription. He sent me a long note explaining how disappointed he was that I was “scared” of spiders. He had some parting advice. I should just carry a stick with me and warn the widows I was coming by rattling it around corners and crevices. That’s what he did when he went camping with his friends, out in the woods (i.e., not his house).
It reminded me of something:
This is how the world deals with threats. They see one threat. They shrug. They don’t want to overreact. That’s what they care about. They don’t care about letting a problem spiral out of control. They care about how they look. They want to let it spiral out of control before they do anything about it. Then they wring their hands and tell everyone about what a serious problem they have.
This is not how I managed threats, and it makes me an outlier. It makes me weird. It makes me unpopular. But it also keeps my family… alive.
So, we got a new pest control company.
The new pest control company arrived the same day. Wouldn’t you know, they started finding more black widows. On the house. In the attic. They found old, ragged insulation with potential egg sacs. It was hard to tell. The insulation looked like one big egg sac. This is where textbooks conflict with experience. Textbooks say widows don’t like to lay eggs in insulation. Experienced pest control experts tell you, it depends. Black widows lay eggs where they can.
“It’s a ticking time bomb,” one of them said.
“I’d call that up there a death trap.”
So, we dealt with it.
We’ll never know what would’ve happened.
We’ll never know how many black widows would’ve moved into our house. We’ll never know how many times they would’ve bitten my daughter or me in the middle of the night. We’ll never know how many times they would’ve bitten one of our cats. We’ll never know if we’d wound up in that 1.4 percent.
We do know…
A big portion of society doesn’t take black widows seriously, not when they’re living in your house. They’re quick to downplay the threat. They’re happy to sit around and throw numbers at you. They’re content to consult AI and memories of camping trips to give you advice from their phone. They’re perfectly at peace to wait and see what happens to you. After all, it’s not their problem.
It’s yours.
Maybe you see the analogy.
Personally, I would’ve liked to live in a world where we would never know how fascist America could become. I would’ve preferred to never know what a war with Iran would look like. I would’ve loved a future where we never knew how bad the climate crisis could’ve gotten. What a nice world.
Instead, we’re finding out the hard way.
You see?
It starts with one black widow. It starts with one fascist politician. It starts with one outbreak. It starts with one piece of misinformation.
This is the story of my life.
You’d think we would learn. We don’t. The same people telling you how bad fascism is now are telling you to live with black widows. They’re telling you to live with all the other threats. They can only deal with the threats they allowed to explode into everyone’s lives. They act like heroes cleaning up their own mess, the mess you tried to warn them not to make in the first place.
On that note…
It’s been a rough week in a rough year. I’ll get right to the point. After I posted about the issues that matter most to me—issues that should matter to the rest of the world—this newsletter lost nearly a hundred subscribers.
Over the last 12 months, my newsletters have shed almost 1,000 paying subscribers. Absconding readers often send me a note explaining why they’re leaving. It’s not their finances. It’s not the content.
It’s not my writing.
They often make a point of telling me how valuable they find my work, as a preamble to airing a petty grievance that’s driving them away. It always comes down to the same thing. I tried to warn them about a black widow.
They found that…
Unacceptable.
But I’m not going to stop talking about things that make people uncomfortable. I’m not going to pretend we only have one threat to deal with. I’m not going to act like you’re saving the world because you attended a No Kings protest, while not wearing a medical mask, or because you liked a post from some flunkie journalist promising to take on corruption somewhere. I’m not going to pretend our problems will get better once Trump dies or leaves office. I’m not going to act like JD Vance doesn’t still have a fairly good shot at winning in 2028. I’m not going to act like Trump won’t try to run. I’m not going to pretend his base is fragmenting. I’m not going to speculate about his health or mental state. That’s amateur hour.
Dismissing threats is how we wound up where we are. I’m not here to dismiss threats. I’m here to explain them and deal with them. I’m here to talk about the world as it actually is, not how I want it to be.
Aren’t you?
Right now, everyone is dealing with threats some of us tried to warn them about years ago. They’re not listening to us about the ones that just rappelled into the hallway. They don’t seem to care about rain harvesting or composting toilets. Once again, they see the one black widow and shrug. They call us crazy.
It wasn’t like my life was going just cottagecore before a black widow infestation. It wasn’t like I was bored. I had other problems and responsibilities. But this is how responsible adults behave. When you see a new threat, you deal with it. You don’t shrug it off. You don’t ignore it. You don’t rationalize it away. You don’t fantasize about a zombie apocalypse while black widows are laying eggs in your house. You have to hold multiple things in your head.
You deal with them.
This old mindset has to change. We live in a completely different era now. You can’t deal with one threat at a time anymore. You have to see how they’re entwined, like that mess in our attic. You have to deal with all of it.
Some of you already see what I’m saying. If nothing else, I hope this personal fable provides you with a little relief. You’re not the only one who sees the world this way. You’re not the only one who would rather live in a world where we never knew how bad things would get, because we dealt with them.
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Thanks for sticking around.
Well put. Remain true to yourself and commitments.
I so resonate with the "are you sure?" patronizing of women. I remember when my truck was stolen, and I called the cops. They showed up and asked me (not exaggerating) at least five times, "Are you sure that's where you parked it? Are you sure you didn't give anyone else a key? Not your boyfriend? Not your roommate?" On and on. Of course they soon recovered it, stripped and hotwired.
Same when my engine fused (thankfully just approaching the crest) of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. I cruised all the way down to a safe stop on the shoulder, called a tow truck (male driver) who was convinced I had run out of gas. Of course *I* knew my engine had smelled smoky just as I had approached the bridge, and that I'd called my mechanic from that slow-moving traffic to ask whether I should get on the bridge or not, and even mentioned that my car heater hadn't worked that morning (which should have been a dead giveaway, I now know, of a failed water system) and that despite the fact that he had told me to just "bring it in later," it was now kaput and anyway, I pay attention and have never, in 45 years of driving, run out of gas.
The amusing revenge against over-confident and under-respectful men in positions of authority came when I *did* "bring it in," rolling up unto my mechanic's raised driveway back in the city. "How did you get it here?" they asked, incredulous, knowing my car didn't run.
I had had it towed to my apartment on a hill, had put it in neutral and skillfully rolled downhill, around corners through stop signs, with just enough momentum to roll up onto their driveway and park. Voila!