Editor,
I am moved to respond to the letter of Matthew Kennicott. He asserts that "Many youths today, especially on college campuses, have empty minds that are being filled with anti-American, anti-Christian ideals." He seems to believe that those of us who do not support our present "war" don't think for ourselves.
His is a vacuous argument. The idea that students are a helpless lot unable to protect themselves from "the leftist community which dominates campus life" is paternalistic pap. Progressive, "leftist" ideas do not "dominate" universities or any other center of power in our society or we wouldn't be dropping cluster bombs near the towns of Afghanistan where children can pick them up.
I will agree that universities are places where "liberals" congregate, but I would argue that progressive thinkers gather at educational institutions precisely because campuses are places where inquiry is encouraged. It is my opinion that we who question the ethics of what this country is doing in Afghanistan and around the globe are being hugely patriotic!
Dissent in the face of policies that we find antithetical to the ideals of being a just, honorable and noble nation is the best of what being "American" is. To suggest that those of us who find the killing of innocent people repugnant are somehow "un-Christian" is a bizarre irony - let me not mention that this is a secular nation.
When I read the quotes from Christ in the Bible, I have a hard time imagining him being on the side of this war. It seems farfetched to me to imagine that a person who counseled "turn the other cheek" would support us dropping bombs, some of which leave holes the size of four square football fields and others which are designed to kill anyone who picks them up.
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Can a cluster bomb tell a child from a Taliban warrior? What would Jesus make of the phrase "collateral damage?" Not every war we've fought has been a "noble" one. In my view the "war" we are engaging in today is ill considered and hastily planned. Our goals are nebulous and the moral underpinnings for continuing the destruction of an already devastated Afghanistan, fast eroding.
Avrum Katz
UNM student
