Raccoons

I saw a meme recently and it goes something like this: you have a house and the basement is flooded with raccoons. Try as you might, you can’t rid of the infestation of raccoons. You seek help to get rid of the rodents but no one in town seems to be able to get rid of them entirely. Then you hear about a guy who can. This guy does not have the best of reputations. This guy doesn’t smell the greatest. The guy is basically a slob. His methods are questionable. But he gets rid of the raccoons. You wouldn’t have to worry about the raccoons anymore and that’s all that matters, because results matter.

What do I think of this meme? This story that has been passed around to basically say the ends justify the means? Well?

I could attack the premise of the entire meme and say this is a completely made up, self-serving story. But in a way, that’s self-serving to me. So let’s take another angle or two.
I think that getting to the point where you feel that one guy can solve your problems can be a Faustian deal. What I’m saying is maybe you feel the most important problem in your life is a basement full of raccoons. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But if you obsess over this problem and feel only one person can fix the issue, you get what you get. Maybe the raccoons are gone now. But maybe the one person who fixed the issue gives you an entirely different set of raccoons to deal with. Said another way, if you make a deal with the devil that is a problem within itself. You’ve traded one problem for another.

Then there’s the matter of what are you compromising. I don’t think anyone gets through this life with a clean slate; everyone on this planet has had to compromise in some way they didn’t want to. But let’s say this guy who is not that great of a person decided to get rid of the raccoons by torching your basement. I mean, he got rid of the raccoons! But you do not have a basement anymore. Was it worth the price of compromise? 
There is also a question of who is posing this question to you in the first place. Depending on who is asking, I would want to know if “raccoons” is a euphemism for anything else. Raccoons are rodents. Are we supposed to take the story as is or is there a subtext underlying the issue?

Overall, I don’t think very highly of the meme. What I believe it’s attempting to do is tell you that you must tolerate a person who may compromise your morals if it gets you what you want. I think that is a very dangerous game to play; the one issue that you feel is the biggest problem may not have been. You may have been hyper focused on that one thing and it wasn’t the issue in the first place.

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