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From: alberti@donald.cs.umn.edu (Timothy Fay)
Newsgroups: trial.talk.politics.peace,alt.activism.d,talk.politics.misc,soc.men,soc.veterans
Subject: Re: Conscience and Cowardice
Message-ID: <1991May29.055718.25895@cs.umn.edu>
Date: 29 May 91 05:57:18 GMT
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grossg@patriot.rtp.dg.com (Gene Gross) writes:

>Did Thoreau whimper and whine when he had to pay the price for his
>stand?  Did Rev. Martin Luther King whimper and whine when he had to
>pay the price for his stand?  Need I point to more men and women who
>had personal honor and integrity and a sense of personal duty?  These
>are heroes not because they held to positions that I agree with,
>because some of the views I disagree with vigorously; they are heroes
>because they had the sense of personal duty and the personal honor and
>integrity to stand by their words, to maintain the course of their
>convictions regardless of the personal cost to them.  And they did not
>whimper and whine like some delicate little flowers.

I got through most of this post until I came across this paragraph.
I'll leave the obvious contradictions for others to hack apart.  I'll
just point out that Thoreau and King (and others, like Gandhi) were
forced to "pay the price" for their stands because cruel, hateful,
vindictive people persecuted and, in two of the three cases, killed
them.  How does this compare with the behavior of the U.S. Military
(and its supporters) toward the handful of "cowards" who refused to
kill on command?  Some resisters, still in shackles, were believed
to have drowned when a Navy boat sank in the Persian Gulf shortly
before the war with Iraq started.  Would Thoreau, King, or Gandhi
have approved of something like that?  I doubt it.  If this nation's
military was as great as some claim, it would understand that the
resisters made a mistake when they signed up, and the military made
a mistake by accepting them.  It should not compound that mistake by
needlessly punishing these people.

The people whose names you invoked were heroes because, among other
things, they possessed great understanding and compassion.  Perhaps
those who want the book thrown at the resisters could learn something
from them.

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"If we don't succeed, we risk failure."  -Dan Quayle