submission for the LOHV Ohio blog, on behalf of villagedeer.com

There is a sociology study to be made here on urban leadership choosing the easiest way to reduce their immediate pain. Their pain is complaints from residents about deer eating hostas, the easiest path is to shoot deer with the added benefit of looking like a tough hombre. It's the same strategy Bush used to address his crushing unpopularity and the nation's fear of terrorism: shoot Iraqis. It didn't matter that one wasn't connected to the other or that the solution creates even more complications. What mattered was that there was an immediate, aggressive response and that he look like a hero. Pat McGinnis and Jack Straub certainly want to look like heroes.

If you watched most of our meeting's video you probably saw a couple of people say they couldn't believe the "opposition" would put deer lives ahead of human lives. I say ultimately we're fighting the notion that killing is the best way to solve a problem, and we want to prevent our kids, if we can, from acclimating to violence as a solution. It's not such a long way from culling deer to invading countries. Both actions reduce complex issues to black and white, both are acceptable only when you devalue life. None of these actions solve anything, in fact the need to escalate the action is the inescapable, totally predictable outcome. Violence perpetuates more violence by giving comfort to the pretense that a somehow unsolvable core problem can be made to go away if we only use more firepower.

Heroic action doesn't always look heroic on TV. It takes more courage, more resolve, more patience and more skill than this to really solve these problems. Public servants? Why do they really want those jobs, anyway?


Rob Slater
villagedeer.com