I don’t know about you the reader but I don’t particularly like rats. I see them riding on the shoulders of some human and it kind of sends a chill down my spine. I don’t really have anything against them or those who own them, but still they are rats. But tonight I couldn’t help ponder about the Rats of Tus.

They were quite ingenious and very smart, smarter than the rats of any other age. These rats could think, read, and reason. That is why I was pondering them tonight. Their story is quite remarkable, but I was wondering about their fate. So, let me tell you of their story.

Many years ago the Rats of Tus migrated to a wonderful new land. The land was way more land than they ever though they would fill. The rats started off as a community of people. They lived in large groups. The rats would build quite ingenious nests and had a varied culture.

Well as rats do, they began to multiply and develop. Greater and greater their civilization became, if you could possibly think of rodents as having culture.

The rats were very inventive and had the ability to work together, and even for a time, brought in other rats that they used as slave labor.

Well, as the story goes the rats filled the land and began to pack it out. I’ve seen the studies of when too many rats get cloistered into a confined space. The rats start acting out in strange behaviors. Mother rats kill their young. High numbers of rats become agitated and aggressive.

The Rats of Tus lived in a strange society and that is why I am so curious about them. The Rats of Tus got to a point that each family of rats had its own nest. The nests had started off primitive but the culture advanced so much that not any nest could be built. Their culture was so advanced that they had worker rats that limited what a family of rats could build. They called it progress. These nests were nothing impressive to us, but they put great value on the magnificence of their nest.

A rats nest magnificent, you say? Well compared to us, I mean, you know, they were rats nests. I mean what can you say about a filthy rat nest. Made of materials they had gathered with its boundaries of markers that designated where their territory began and ended. The rats were so advanced that they would even buy and sell nests for hundreds and thousands of plastic baubles.

Each rat family lived in its own nest. Fifty to sixty thousand rats would live together in a community. It really makes my skin crawl to think of that many rats. Then it grew to between five and six million in a community. That is why I was wonder about the Rats of Tus, because we know when you get that many rats, or any other species together, diseases and pestilences seem to wipe them out.

The society of the rats was set up with training ground where the younger rats could learn. There were rats that were in charge and these were elected. The rats had a form of community government, organization, and philosophy.

The rats had a strange culture, but I guess not for rats. Each rat was after the benefit of his own livelihood and self. The rat populations only wanted what each individual rat wanted. The fat rats played into this and thought up new trinkets and “shinys” to sell to the other rats. I guess even the fat rats were deceived, for how valuable are plastic baubles anyway.

The rat government kept trying to further control and submits the rats to be good. The culture was getting way out of hand. One rat would lose its mind and kill ten to twenty other rats at a time. Rats would steal, kill, and vandalize other rats’ nests. It was bad. The more the government tried to control the rats the farther the rat society got out of control.

Now me personally, I don’t think that all the laws caused all the problems. I don’t think the symptoms of “A” were caused by “B”. But, the rats could not figure this out. I know I was talking about how smart these rats were, but still they were rats. As I ponder the problem I think the rat culture of self focus led to the problems of the rat populations.

The rats tried to institute all these laws but it was the culture of greed that was causing them trouble. Almost like a sickness. If there is a dangerous pestilence going through out a land that causes mayhem, illness, and death; no laws are really going to control it.

Plus, I think the Rats of Tus pushed their young ones too hard into the mental fields of science. Rats were not really made for that. I mean, even though that some rats were very smart; rats were made to run and scurry, and scavenge for their food. Kind of like us, we were made to primarily work hard and later to think. For, a man who physically works hard rests well at night and is satisfied at the end of a day with a job well done. I think the rats need this too. I mean just as the mind is fulfilled by hard study; the body also needs to find fulfillment in all it can achieve also.

Maybe this is why they had such a problem with mental illness or mental brokenness. The minds of the young rats got to a point where they were worked too hard and just broke, like when my back goes out when I try to lift too much. Some people can do hard labor all day, I used too. Dig ditches, build houses, stack lumber, but it wasn’t till I became a manager that my back first went out. And now that it gone out I have to protect it and try to strengthen it in its no pain zone. I wonder if this concept would help the Rats of Tus with their mentally broken rats.

Well it might help, but I forgot their culture is broken. Since their main culture is broken with self centeredness, anything that they think of as not helping them, they throw away. They have lost the ability to nurture and restore the broken. Sometimes mentally broken rats stay broken the rest of their lives, so there is no great push to help the mentally ill rats.

The rats are actually at a disadvantage because they usually cannot think like we think. I mean they are rats. Self centered by nature, willing to go with the actions of the rat mobs, only concerned with fattening themselves up and padding their nest to raise their young. If their young are successful they are successful.

So how could I influence any rat, I mean, how could I plant a seed of community, and truth, and that the rat population of Tus as a whole is family? Even if I did inspire one, how could that one influence and change a culture? I mean would you want to lower your standard of living if it meant finding fulfillment. Would you want to deal with uncertainty and the possibility of death if it meant the culture as a whole would be fixed? What about your TV? Would you destroy it and never watch it again, and work in a field, and live without electricity to live in a Utopia? I don’t think I would either.

I don’t think Utopia is something external. I think Utopia is a state of being, and mass Utopia is a state of culture. What if their were no more wars, no more killings, no more lying, no more hatred? But what are we going to sacrifice to get there? I talked about possessions, but what about the harder stuff: like sacrificing our desire to be better than others, sacrificing our desires to have more than the ‘Jones?’ What about our need to be right, and proud and self determining?

I guess this is but a pipe dream, for a government ran by rats is still made up of rats. If the general rat populations are slimy, creepy, and well - made up of rats, then if the government of the rats is made out of those rats, then the governmental rats will be as vile as the population.

Well, I guess I will leave the Rats of Tus to their fate, because it only takes one bad rat to spoil the ideology of Utopia for them. But, I have found that each rat in itself can have Utopia in its heart, no matter what the rest of the population is doing.

Maybe, someday I’ll visit them again and talk to a few rats and maybe they will come to understand and look at their culture from a higher perspective; for peace is not dependant on the condition of the sea.

Thanks for traveling along with me in my thoughts about the rats of Tus. I was just wondering about them; ‘What would happen to them?’ I guess only the future will tell us. I am getting tired now and going to head back off to bed.

Oh I just realized I have capitalized the wrong letters in the word ‘Tus’, it should actual read the land of tUS. I guess I’ll have to go back and fix that later. Maybe I’ll leave it to my editor. I wonder if I will dream of the land of the US again. I wonder how many rats their whole world can contain with all their cultural problems. I think now it is somewhere over six billion.

Goodnight all,

I will see you again when we wake up in the next glorious morning.

Sleep well and God bless.

How this story came about:

Last night I was really ill. Every time I stood up I got really weak and pale. Just before 7 pm I was laying on the couch looking out our screen door watching the people walking by the park to go to the store on a beautiful and cool spring evening. I got a mental picture of all the people walking by were rats; six foot tall rats. I thought something like, what would our culture look like from a higher species, if we were all just rats in their eyes.

I went to bed just after 7pm and woke back up at 9pm and this idea was heavily on my mind. So, I decided to write this story. I was trying to get across the message about what our culture would look like from another perspective; what would we look like to a higher level intelligence? That way we could glean maybe some insights into the reality of our culture.

Please forgive me if you think I think the whole world is made up of rats, which I don’t; because I am fond of us human. Even after this story, I still get that slight creepy feeling when I think about rats.