Of bats and men

Of bats and men

EDITOR:

The other day at work I caught a bat that had been flying around in the women’s residential floor for days. Everyone was in a state of panic, convinced that this harmless little creature was out to get them, would swoop out of the darkness of night to do something profoundly evil, and demanded its immediate and merciless execution.

I put on a glove and found a box with a small round hole cut out of one side. The bat was asleep on the wall as it was daytime. I had to find a chair to stand on to reach it. I gazed at it from a distance of one foot. It was sound asleep, ugly but very small and delicate, like a bird.

I hesitated for a second lest I injure it with my huge gloved hand but realizing that the other alternative was cruelty I gripped it with my hand and swept it down into the box. It tried to bite me, only I was too quick and the glove too thick. I felt sorry for it. Sorry for its ugliness that inspired unwarranted fear, and for its smallness. It felt like a feather in my hand. It fluttered, afraid of being crushed, which I could easily have done. Indeed, most people would have done so without pity or remorse, as if they did not share space in the same moral Universe or as if cruelty has no limitations. They are unaware that our best protection is not power unbounded, but awareness and even kindness toward other living creatures.

And this may be a parable, I don’t know, for the prisoners at Guantanamo, caught in the national panic to find scapegoats, who have been tortured and deprived of all kindness despite their frailty or even innocence. Torture has become a kind of national ideology, a litmus test for our patriotism. Cruelty and power without end doesn’t know its limitations, doesn’t know that the end of fear is the beginning of faith. Anything less than that is false religion.

ROGER LAFONTAINE

Youngstown

Who are they calling sexist?

EDITOR:

Obama is labelled sexist because of his lipstick on a pig comment. Republicans are new at this “sexist” thing because they are getting it backwards. Obama would have been sexist if he had not made the comment.

Sexism happens when you treat women differently than you would if they were men. Obama’s comment would have been perfectly OK if McCain’s vice presidential candidate had been male. He made a reference to something she herself boasted about in a speech and turned it around to expose a weakness in her position. That is what political rivals do. That’s how the system works.

If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. I believe Truman came up with that line, Harry, not Bess.

MARGUERITE FELICE

Youngstown

So, who is looking at race?

EDITOR:

Regarding the comments by Reps. Letson and Hagan it is my observation that the Ohio Newspaper Poll provides the facts of the matter being discussed.

The first column on page 3 Sunday shows that only 55 percent of white race favor McCain (34 percent for Obama) while 98 percent of black race favor Obama (0 for McCain).

While this poll, like all polls, will not reflect with total accuracy it is certainly indicative of public opinion.

GORDON C. WILLIAMS

Ellsworth