WHAT THE CICADAS HAVE TAUGHT ME

In what appears to be its 963rd consecutive daily story about the ongoing cicada invasion here in the DC area, the Washington Post trots out a columnist to opine that the "half-blind bugs" (as my 5-year-old calls them) can teach us all Something Important about life. I couldn't read the whole thing without wanting to gouge my own eyes out, but I think it had something to do with cell phones, magnet schools and ajustable rate mortgage refinancing. Valuable lessons, indeed.

But what can we really learn? First, if you work for a major-metro daily, ask to be moved off the cicada beat before they start talking back to you. For the rest of us, consider this: Cicadas crawl out of the ground and shed their skins. Then they fly around lopsidedly like drunken congressmen, randomly bouncing off trees, walls and other inanimate objects. If you pick one up and toss it in the air, a few moments pass before it occurs to it that it might be a good idea to start flapping its wings. They're edible by just about everything even a notch above them in the food chain (including the French), so their natural defense is to sit out in the open like the delectable morsels they are. They don't bite, don't fly, don't even move much, and are pretty much the most passive sentient beings this side of Codependents Anonymous.

If it wasn't for the fact that they appear by the millions -- too many to all die in gruesome yet comically inept airborne collisions, too many to all be squashed, stepped on or eaten while on the ground -- their continued existence would prove Darwin wrong about that whole survival-of-the-fittest, or at least the survival-of-the-smartest, thing. Then again, the same could be said for the folks who post comments on this site (scroll down to the comments).