Opinion: To the bug man who told me Democrats need to wake up

I’m in my office alone, working. Papers and open books bloom across the floor. My desk is crowded with drafts, notes and other routine disorder related to my job as a writer.

You, the bug man, arrive with your spray rig and canister of poison.

“Hi, Jason,” I say, and get up from my desk. “How about I go outside and water while you spray.” I apologize for the mess, though you know by now that I am always in the middle of some writing project.

We are not the same, you and I. I have always known that. But until today, I mistook politeness for peace.

On the porch, you ask me what I’m working on.

“Historical fiction.”

That is all the invitation you need. You begin to lecture me about World War II, about how Jews really did control global finances, how your daughter discovered she was part Jewish and you told her not to worry about it, how it was the Democrats who started the KKK and they wouldn’t even back Abraham Lincoln if he were alive today. It’s an endless reel of absurd falsehoods and distortions dressed up as historical facts.

“Wake up,” you say you want to tell Democrats.

Wake up, as if Republicans have not spent years setting the house on fire and blaming people who are down on their knees coughing in the yard.

I was taught that how one approaches the truth should not be dictated by political party affiliation. On the contrary. Ours are old divisions and disagreements. What is different now, which you, the bug man, so willingly personify, is that many people have lost the capacity to differentiate between right and wrong, regardless of party. And your poison is so pervasive and persistent it’s getting harder even for Democrats like me, with open minds, to separate being a Republican from being willfully blind to what this administration is doing to our country.

Maybe because I’m a white woman of a certain age in South Mississippi, you assume I’m one of your own. Someone who will nod through the sermon and call it neighborliness.

I would understand if you said all politicians lie, or that you were finished with the whole ruined carnival. I could meet you there. But to stand in my yard railing against Democrats while lauding Republicans? That is not skepticism. That is delusion. Standing there watering my zinnias, I want to say: Do you understand who and what you’re defending? Patriotism is not a flag, a pin or a slogan on a hat. Patriotism is when you love your country and refuse to excuse what is wrong. Refusing to admit what is wrong—that is the opposite.

If you’re still defending this administration, still insisting that only Democrats need to wake up, then you’re obviously willing to sleep through any alarm. I’m done smiling while your poison gets sprayed into the body politic.

How’s all that winning going, anyway? Gas is way up. Groceries are way up. Even wars are up. If you vote for people who govern by grievance, you do not get to pretend the consequences fell from the sky.

You start telling me about how smart Hitler was, about how he wrote in prison. You’re all in on the fascism. “You should watch some shows about Hitler,” you say. I stand there with the hose on the oleanders, thinking: I write about World War II. My mother lived through it. Some of her family survived Hitler. Most did not.

You come to spray away pests. I’ve listened to your lectures about the Civil War, space aliens and “facts” that you learn from cable news and internet folklore. Correcting you would feel like turning my garden hose onto a house fire.

In 2026, we are still fighting for voting rights in Mississippi—the same rights my parents recognized as urgent when they lived here in 1958. The past is not past here. It simmers in the heat while people like you polish old lies until they shine like new policy.

Here in South Mississippi, termites are known to take down a house. There are also cockroaches, fire ants, wasps and all manner of things that bite, burrow, swarm and sting. We need pest control. The metaphor is hard to ignore: Poison can be useful in the right application, dangerous when used recklessly and disastrous when it’s seen as the answer to everything.

Your job is to spread poison, but you’ve poisoned yourself with your own poison.

I watch you amble up the driveway, bent under the weight of your equipment, hauling your chemical gospel. Afterward, my husband emails your company to say we don’t want to see you on our property again. There’s only so much poison a person can take.

Back in my office, I return to a poem my great-aunt Hattie wrote in 1954 for a women’s club in Mississippi. “The Man Versus the Party” urged members to vote for candidates with character instead of surrendering judgment to blind party loyalty. Imagine that now: character as a civic duty, conscience heavier than a party line.

Seventy-two years later, that sounds radical. And crucial.

Wake up, you said.

Believe me, I have.

The question I have for you, poison man, is what it will take to wake you up.

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Image: Poison sign (via Pixabay.com)