Man, did I not need bedbugs right now. The stresses in my own life notwithstanding, things are getting very interesting in public education with the entry of Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond into the dialogue, not to mention that it’s the annual FSA Festival of Sniping. There is a lot of scope for discussion at the Vancouver Sun’s blog, and material galore for a column or two for publication here on The Schools We Need. I would love to be commenting; there are many points that need to be made that for some reason other people can’t or won’t make.

But with bed bugs, who has time?

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t know much about bed bugs when this all started. But a very brief amount of research on line (I’ve rarely been more grateful for the internet) is convincing evidence that this is not like an attack of any other insect, not even lice.

Granted, lice are difficult. But bedbugs are a lot harder.

With bed bugs, not just one person but your whole house and all your belongings can be involved, including furniture. And bed bugs are long term. It will be something in the order of months before we can say with any level of certainty that we are bed bug free. And that’s if we’re lucky, and actually avoid a few bugs becoming an infestation.

How do “decent people” get bedbugs? In what must be one of the cruellest ironies around, we got them from one of the cleanest people I’ve ever met, who unfortunately lives in a multi-unit apartment building. The tenants next door to her must have been infested, and when they moved out, the bedbugs moved into her apartment. They sense their prey by detecting the carbon dioxide we breathe out as we sleep, and they are so slick that they can get through walls and ceilings by finding the openings around wires, ducting, and baseboards.

She was not yet aware she had bedbugs, although she had noticed some bites, when my family visited her and put our coats on the bed. Bed bugs are good hitchhikers. We brought a few home, likely pregnant females since that is the genre of bed bug that has the most yen for travel. When the bites started at home, we realized quickly what was going on and swung into action.

The problem is… what action? These things are brutally hard to combat. I won’t write a primer here; let’s just say that it involves a complete reorganization of space and stuff, and if, like us, a person has too much stuff in too little space, the upheaval can be pretty dramatic.

But why, you may wonder, would I write about it here? Two reasons, basically.

One is as a public service. You may not have heard, but bedbugs are on a global upsurge, especially through the western world. New York is currently in the grips of a serious epidemic, and Australia became infested after the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

But for all that the bugs have garnered little mainstream press as far as I’m aware. One local story did appear in the Tyee, not that that’s mainstream so far. http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/05/15/BedBugs/

With our own Olympics coming up, bed bugs should be getting more attention than they do. We apparently already have a fairly high level of infestation in apartments and hotels in Vancouver and things can’t possibly get better if more people coming with bed bugs arrive. And we won’t exactly impress our visitors who rent accommodation in Vancouver during the event if they take bugs home with them.

The sooner people learn about the threat posed by bed bugs and start taking steps to protect themselves, the better. I’ll try to write a bit about what those steps might be in the next couple of days, as well as about what to do if you realize you have brought a bug or two home.

My other reason for writing about bedbugs here does have to do with public education. I think that a century of public education for children has left western societies rather incapable of dealing with emerging issues and solving problems rapidly among adults. I wrote about this in my first essay here at The Schools We Need, “Do as I say, not as I do,” about our proclivity to offload our problems onto the slender shoulders of our defenceless youth rather than addressing them among adults now.

I’m willing to bet that somewhere, someone has opined that schools should be teaching kids about bed bugs, and if they haven’t, they’re about to.

The bed bugs provide an excellent salutary example of the idiocy of our preference for teaching children how they should solve problems in the future rather than for trying out our fabulous ideas in real life first. Bed bugs are something that should be attacked now and aggressively, not through storybooks and tactful notices sent home.

In order to deal with this problem adult-to-adult, we need to talk about it without middlemen, without political interference, without organizational agendas, and without - no pun intended - baggage. The relationship between teachers and parents is so poisonous already that creating some sort of a hierarchy in which the propensity to put teachers in the role of counsellors to parents and of parents to regard teachers as such is not further exacerbated.

There is a better way to deal with the burgeoning bed bug epidemic than to filter the information through teachers and their organizations and translate it into childese for oblique and uncertain delivery to parents. It involves adults talking to each other through whatever media (as in: plural of mediums) we have available.

I know, it’s a revolutionary concept. But with this little article, I hope to make a start. I'll be back to write more.