The Big Rat

On any given day if you walk around NYC, you are bound to see a big rat standing in front of some building. I am not talking about an enormous live rat but an inflatable one. It’s always a disturbing site for a number of reasons:

1)      It’s a big frigging rat

2)      It signifies that someone in the building or a company in the building does things in a dirty way or conducts things in an underhanded way

Neither of these reasons gives me warm or fuzzy feelings.

As a New Yorker, rats don’t phase me too much. I watch them in the subway tracks and observe where they go. This year I’ve been ‘greeted’ more than ever on my morning walks to the train by at least two that scurry along any of the blocks I walk on (we happen to have a serious problem on our hands this year since we didn’t have a cold winter) Yes, they are gross but as long as I have protective shoes (hence, not any open toe shoes or flip flops), I’m ok.

But this inflatable rat is bothersome because it really taps into so many people’s fears. It’s an enormous rat with beady red eyes – even if rats don’t ‘bother’ me, this is disgusting. And to think that I see one of these on a pretty consistent basis makes me wonder about the conditions that people are working in. In this day and age, you’d think people would treat each other with more respect but it seems to be getting worse. Just as the real rat population is growing, it seems the human rat population continues to get worse as well.