(As yet another killer, this time on the campus of Santa Barbara, California, is identified as possibly having Asperger’s syndrome, I, as a Bipolar Aspie, offer this poem written to my Aspie husband for May 14, 2014, on the occasion of our 25th wedding anniversary, to show that not all people with Asperger’s reach for a gun and are violent.)
This “tres sensible,” furry doe appeared in our backyard one morning, showing no fear of us as we went about our activities. It pains me that Vassar College has hired hunters to feed deer, luring them to their death for mercenary gain in some non-sensical culling. As if hunting season weren’t bad enough. My heart sank for this fearless doe, unafraid of us. She must learn to be afraid of humans because humans are cold-hearted killers, hiding under the guise of sportsmanship and pest control. What kind of sport is this to entice deer to an area using food as bait and then, when trust is established, shooting them? It makes me ashamed of the human race. Issac Bashevis Singer, who fled the Nazis himself, and whose mother and brother were killed in the Camps, writes most eloquently on the subject in his ode to a mouse:
“What do they know—all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
MOONSIDE 