Bear Slain: Message to Obama Campaign?

Cub shot in the head found in N.C. with Obama posters wrapped around it.

By Fred Mills

With memories of cries of "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" at McCain-Palin rallies in recent weeks still lingering, the election trail took an ominous turn yesterday morning (Oct. 20) when the body of a dead bear covered with Obama signs was found at the entrance of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC.

According to a report filed by the Asheville Citizen-Times daily newspaper, maintenance workers found a 75-pound bear cub on the campus that had apparently been shot in the head - a pair of Obama campaign posters had been stapled together and draped over the dead animal's head.

Chief of university police Tom Johnson told reporters, "Someone evidently was wanting to draw attention to the election. If we find out who they are, we'll make sure they'll get some attention themselves."

Added WCU associate vice chancellor, "We cannot speculate on the motives of the people involved nor who those people might be. Campus police are cooperating with authorities to investigate this matter."

Local TV station WLOS broadcast a report on the incident, displaying a picture of the campaign signs that additionally had some unspecified words written on duct tape attached to the sign. The content of those words was not released but speculation has already arisen that they were either of a political or racial component, or both.

"A sick individual who thinks extremely badly about Obama," freshman Daniel Ford told WLOS, with political science professor Chris Cooper observing, "I think it sends a pretty disturbing message, obviously it sounds like it may have some racial implications and at the very least its somebody sending the wrong message and taking this hot political season the wrong way."

At the Citizen-Times website, readers' comments regarding the report were posted, including one that read, in part, "In a perverse way, this is extremely logical. Animal haters tend to be more conservative and, thus, more likely to hate Obama and even use violence. This is all embodied in Ms. Palin." Predictably, a rebuttal was posted shortly thereafter that read, "Your comment makes no sense. You are making huge assumptions with no basis. You also take everything you don't like and arbitrarily assign them all to a person about whom you have no knowledge. You have no evidence that any candidate advocates violence toward anouther candidate."

Regardless, whether or not the bear killing was the product of some drunk hunters making a very, very bad joke, or someone intending specifically to send a none-too-veiled message to the Obama campaign, the end result is the same. People that do things like this, or people who laugh and look on approvingly, are the same people who barely a generation earlier would have thought nothing about hanging a noose or placing a burning cross in someone's front yard.

Come to think of it, some of them still do.

As a friend of mine put it succinctly when we were discussing the incident, "If you had begun to forget who we're fighting [in this election], this should remind us."