Just last weekend, I was gifted a small piece of furniture purchased from a ReStore. This piece of furniture was a small cabinet designed to hold various forms of media, with an unmistakable ’80s fake wood grain decal all over it. Well, that wasn’t the only non-aesthetically-pleasing thing on it, or rather in it. As soon as I turned the cabinet onto its side, I saw a huge network of spiderwebs all over the bottom of it, and tons of spider eggs. I got to cleaning all this nasty old stuff when my finger brushed against something that felt suspiciously… alive. I looked to where my finger had just prodded at and lo and behold, there was a pretty large spider sitting in the corner. I was definitely startled, and then I got to trying to get the spider outside when I noticed something on its back: the telltale red hourglass pattern of a black widow. Now, something you must know about black widows is that their actual level of harm is greatly sensationalized. They are very mild-mannered, and will only bite when they are near death, when they are crushed between you and your clothes, for example. When they do actually bite, you can get pretty sick, sure, but the mortality rate of black widow bites is under 1% – even then, that is almost all people with underlying conditions and very young children. With that in mind, I still freaked out: when media portrays something as if it should be feared, it becomes feared. I sprayed it with pine-sol, which killed it within a minute. I do wonder, though – was that really a warranted response? Just based on fear that has been instilled in us by what has been told to us by the TV when we were young, or what we are told by our friends? Why do we immediately assume the worst of what we don’t have an understanding of? This is not only a story of arachnids and creepy crawlies – this is a story of how we are programmed by everything around us. We don’t have the critical thinking skills to even think of researching something we have been told do hate, either systematically, societally, domestically, or otherwise. Social media makes this much easier to do, and creates an echo chamber where arbitrary biases are confirmed and solidified or placed in one’s mind. This is not a story of a spider (though the aforementioned spider story did happen last weekend) – this is a story of the ideas we carry around and refuse to change. Look into your beliefs, biases, and ideals from time to time – you never know what you may see.