Wednesday, march 2, 1977
daily nebraskan
f.tery.f,lcG'rc'ry
letters
Carter speech writer heat the draft
Ignorant authors
For the last week while reading the "letters" section of
the Daily Nebraskan I could not help but grow sick of the
completely exhausted subject of the deportation of
Nigerians.
How ignorant can the authors of these letters be? Does
the so-called "bigot" actually think that he has the power
or even the wisdom to accomplish the deportation? And
by the same token do the pro-Nigerians believe that the
bannishment of all Nigerians could be accomplished by
the stimulation of one meager letter printed in the "Rag"?
As we all know with the wide-spread circulation the
"Rag" has, the whole world will form an opinion about
the deportation of Nigerians in a matter of seconds, (pun,
pun)
I am probably one of many who don't give a damn one
way or the other, so why does this totally ignorant subject
live on? I hope this is the last letter written concerning
Nigeria arid I truly hope that it will drop. , .
DanRathke
Students mistreat Union .
The Deify Nebraskan has been reporting the financial
situation of the Union. I wonder if it would be helpful
for you to call attention in the news items to student
responsibility for the excess expenditures which are
necessary for upkeep. Many of the students who use the
Union mistreat it horribly. They put feet on furniture, eat
in the lounges without proper care of food and drink, and
so litter the halls and rooms as to require of housekeeping
personnel much extra expense. I should think the carpets
and furniture would not last more than a year or two.
Last week I went into the ladies' lounge on first floor
and found a couple of trays of partially eaten food left on
the floor, paper cups strewn about, several discarded
newspapers rumpled and tossed over furniture and floor,
two girls on the sofas curled up with shoes on, and the
floors of the toilet indicating that users must' be more
accustomed to camping than to modern conveniences.
I'm sure that it is a small minority of students who
have been so poorly reared, and it is a shame for the
others to be assessed higher fees because of these boors.
Perhaps calling attention in a news item would not be of
great help. Could volunteers be secured to enforce certain
rules and regulations? If such regulations for civilized
behavior were posted and volunteers were secured to
enforce them, I am sure the Union would be saved
thousands of dollars and perhaps the ill-bred would
develop some standards for later life.
Elsie M. Jevons
"What Did You Do in the Class War. Daddv?" first
published in October 1975 and reprinted in the current
anniversary edition of The Washington Monthly, is
probably the most powerful argument for unconditional
amnesty ever written.
What makes this unsparing confession of a legal draft
.evader more compelling is the fact that the author, James
Fallows, is now in the White House, a speechwriter for
President Carter,
Fallows was a senior at Harvard in 1969 when his
number came up. He was lucky. Draft-counseling semin
ars, with legal experts and sympathetic medical students,
were a feature of life at Harvard.
The way out for Fallows was, as for so many others, a
physical deferment. He starved himself down .to 120
pounds, a spectral weight for his height of 6 ft. 1 in. He
never considered going.
"To answer the call," he writes with uncommon
honesty, was unthinkable, not only because, in my heart, .
Washington winds
I was desperately afraid of being killed, but also because
my friends, it was axiomatic that one should not
be complicit' in the immoral war effort."
Beat the draft
Fallows beat the draft. To his marginal weight, he
added a hint of madness. In the final moment of his
ordeal at the Boston Navy Yard, he was asked if he had
wer contemplated suicide.
"Oh, suicide-yes, I've been feeling very unstable and
unreliable lately " he replied.
The doctor wrote 4 'unqualified," and Fallows was
home free.
But not entirely.
Because as he and his fellows were returning safely to
the haven of Harvard, a bus from another draft board,
from the working-class town of Chelsea, was drawing up.
And while four of the Chelsea boys were collared
He is haunted by that memory. Because he was well
off, privileged, supported by his peer group, Fallows had
taken the "thinking man's escape route"-the route that
was unavailable to the boys of Chelsea, whose blue-collar
parents could not raise an upper-class clamor.
"As long as the little gold stars kept going to homes in
Chelsea. , .the mothers of. . .Belmont were not on the
telephones to their congressmen screaming you killed my
boy, they were not writing to the President that his crazy,
wrong, evil war had put their boys in prison and ruined
their careers."
Had he and his classmates gone to jail en masse, or had
they gone into the Army, they might well have achieved
their stated goal of shortening the war, Fallows-owns.
Tjeneral Hershey was never in danger of running out
of bodies,, and the only thing we were denying him was
the chance to put us in uniform. With the same x-ray
vision that enabled us to see in every Pentagon subclerk,
in every Honeywell accountant, an embryonic wai
criminal, we could certainly have seen that by keeping
ourselves away from both frying pan and fire, we were
prolonging the war and consigning the Chelsea boys to
danger and death."
Fallows' basic point is that he and his self-righteous
classmates, by their conduct, fed burgeoning class hatred
in the United States.
The inescapable final paragraph, the plea for amnesty,
is not there. He does not conclude his remarkable memoii
with the unavoidable statement that the boys from
Chelsea are being treated the same way in the war's after
math, thus prolonging the class war.
Jimmy Carter forswore unconditional amnesty on the
grounds that it would be unfair to the poor, black and
white, who had no choice but to go. Yet his pardon ol
draft evaders favors once again the well-off, the lucky and
the resourceful, in short, the boys from Harvard.
It is an illogical position. The boys from Chelsea who
went to the war and found out that it was just as bad a:
the Harvard boys had said it was and refused orders,
spoke out or took off-are paying the price in bad dis
charges. - .
Inequities mirrored'
"The inequities of the draft system are mirrored in the
discharge review system," says David Addtestone, director
of the Discharge Review Project at Georgetown Law
Center, who spends his time helping clients get rid of bad
paper."
If they can master the regulations, get good lawyers,
can afford to go before the review board, they can in most
cases win an upgrade, and hope to get a job. The rate of
"employer hesitancy" in the face of anyihing but honor
ables" is 40 per cent.
At- the present rate of review, on a case-by-case basis.
Addlestone estimates, it will take 55 years to process the
half-million bad discharges which Vietnam-era veterans
carry around like monkeys on their backs.
President Carter is said to be engaged with the
Pentagon in negotiations to bring about some "class
upgrading" procedure which would be a form of amnesty
without being called that. :
Fallows will not discuss his own feelings about what
should happen now to the boys from Chelsea.
. "I don't feel free to speak out," he says.
He doesn't need to. He has said it all in "What Did You
Do in the Class War, Daddy?". His employer should read
it.
(Copyrioht 1977 The Washington Star Syndic)
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