LIKE BEAUTY, A DILEMMA MAY BE IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
by Daniel Suits
East Lansing Towne Courier. August 24, 2003

We often use the word "dilemma" in everyday speech to signify an unpleasant situation, but properly, a dilemma is a situation in which there appear to be only two ways out, and both of them are bad. We are, in the classical turn of phrase, caught between a rock and a hard place. Whichever choice we make, we end up in trouble. And the more serious the trouble, the deeper the dilemma. A really deep dilemma presents a choice between two disasters.

In point of fact, however, genuine dilemmas are rare. Usually when we think we are confronted with a choice between two evils, closer consideration reveals that the two choices are not equally bad, or that the two are not, in fact, the only choices available. What appears at first to require the choice between two dangerous outcomes proves to be It provides many similar cartoons each month. .

I encountered a situation like that as a boy growing up in Missouri. It began one evening just before supper when my father strolled out into our side yard and found a swarm of honey bees balled up on the lower limb of one of our maple trees. My father had read a great deal about bees and their habits - he was curious about things like that - and had always wanted bees of his own to experiment with. So he called a beekeeper friend who arrived with an empty hive and helped him shake the bees into it. Dad left the hive under the tree until he could arrange a permanent location for it.

A couple of days later, Dad had fixed a suitable platform in the back yard, about a hundred yards from the original site, and called me to help him carry the hive to the new location. The mouth of the hive was closed by a plug. Dad got on one end and I on the other, and we lifted the hive as gently as we could. Carrying bees, we proceeded slowly and carefully, step by step, toward the back yard.

I was pretty nervous about the whole procedure. The surface of the lawn was irregular, and I could imagine stumbling, dropping the hive, and having angry stinging bees pour all over me. To be doubly sure of my footing, I raised the hive slightly to get a better view of the lawn under my feet. But this also enabled me to see underneath the hive, and there, in one corner, hanging in her heavy web, was a black widow spider.

The black widow – so called from her habit of dining on her erstwhile mate after the
consummation of their union – has a body that looks just like a kid’s marble, shiny black with a small bright red hourglass mark on the underside. The male of the species is quite harmless, but the venom of the female is about fifteen times as deadly as that of the prairie rattlesnake. Fortunately, however, the quantity of venom she can deliver in a bite is so small, that it is rarely lethal to adult humans. It is, however, painful and dangerous if inflicted in a particularly vulnerable spot. In fact, as I saw her hanging there, I thought of my scoutmaster who, just a couple of days before, had come home from several weeks in the hospital, the consequence of a bite in the neck by a black widow spider.
So there I was, carrying a hive full of bees, with a venomous spider hanging beneath. Talk about a choice between two disasters! Hold on to the hive and risk weeks in the hospital, or drop the hive and contend with the angry bees, not to mention the reaction to be expected from my father.

But these alternatives were not really equally bad. Dropping the hive would clearly be an immediate catastrophe, whereas holding on involved only a possibility. I might have a serious spider bite, but than again, I might not. Naturally, against the certainty of the outcome of dropping the hive, I chose the possibility of getting bit. Although I sweated with anxiety every step of the way, we managed to carry the hive safely to its new location.

I learned later that the situation was not nearly as dramatic as I had thought. Venomous as she is, the black widow is extremely uncomfortable outside her web. As long as her web is left undisturbed, she is content to hang quietly upside down in the safety of home, depending on her bright red hourglass to warn away all potential trouble makers. Under the circumstances, I really ran almost no risk. The chance of her biting me was virtually zero.

I wonder if there isn’t a lesson here for this age where we seem to be confronted at every turn with serious international dilemmas.