University of Virginia Library

The Men of Good Will

Very soon now, the government will
announce that there will be a truce for 48
hours in Vietnam this Christmas. There will be
killing and bombing and maiming until
December 24. Then, on Christmas Eve it will
all stop as this pious nation takes a respite
from the business of war to recall the coming
of the Prince of Peace. And on December 26,
the planes will roll from the runways, the
search and destroy missions will leave on
patrol, the bombs will fall on the villages as
the angels once came out of the sky. Santa
Claus will have come and gone, and the
message of Christmas will be safely tucked
away until it reappears on next year's
Christmas cards.

But by all means, let the killing stop this
Christmas. Let it be for the entire nation a
moratorium, a time to ponder the values we
espouse in relation to the course we have
chosen. To consider for a moment, shielded
from the rhetoric of the Cold War, the
Christmas message of peace and good will. To
reflect upon the essential humanity of us all,
black, white and yellow, communist and
capitalist. To wonder at the enduring appeal
of the angels' message, and to ask ourselves
whether we as people have indeed been men
of good will.

Perhaps for a day we can rise above the
pettiness of politics, of racism, of national
chauvinism, and examine ourselves and the
nation we have become. Are we more
tolerant, or less so than we were last year? Has
our desire for victory blinded us to the fact
that those are real people being killed over in
Vietnam? Is our concern for our national
honor overriding our concern for our national
humanity?

If we are to have a meaningful Christmas,
rather than a slick and gaudy celebration, we
must seek the answers to questions such as
these. There should not be a church in the
country this Christmas that sends its congregation
home without challenging it on this basis.
The national moratorium committee has
suggested that students contact their priests or
ministers and ask that they be allowed to
speak to these issues on Christmas Eve. The
suggestion is a sound one. This nation can ill
afford another Christmas which is self righteously
celebrated and which allows
people to return to their daily lives without
thinking about the consequences of their daily
actions.

Perhaps this Christmas can become a day
when Man comes a little closer to the ideal of
peace on earth, a day when Americans resolve
to do better by their potential as a nation.
Perhaps we may all come to realize that God
is on nobody's side in a war, that for every
Hue there is a My Lai; to understand that wars
are fought not for the people who bear the
suffering but for those whose power, when
combined with greed, makes war seem like a
rational alternative. Perhaps Americans can
resolve that never again will this country allow
its fears and suspicions, the baser part of its
nature, to draw it into a senseless and
brutalizing conflict, such as the one we are
now engaged in.

This cannot be done until America
renounces the entire premise that led it into
imperialist ventures in the first place, the
premise that yellow people, that people who
believe in a different system, cannot settle
their own affairs without the consent of the
United States. It cannot be done without a
renunciation of the premise of hostility
between peoples as the natural state of affairs
and not something caused by the machinations
of a handful of men. And it cannot be
done unless America realizes that evil is not
confined behind the Iron Curtain, but that it
exists in our society as well, and that there
will never be peace until men of good will
unite against it.

This is why President Nixon's troop
withdrawals are not the way to peace. They
are based on the war-making premise; they
simply indicate a confidence that the war can
be continued and won with a smaller number
of United States ground combat troops. The
war in Vietnam is still officially a "good" war;
there has been no official recognition of its
futility, its insanity, of the way it has
despoiled the American ideal.

And perhaps, too, Christmas can bring to
America some realization of the folly inherent
in its racial attitudes. Perhaps the idea of a
God to save all men will help America to
realize that we are all, like it or not, brothers,
that we all feel the same pain and seek the
same solaces. Perhaps the clarity and simplicity
of the meaning of Christmas can help us
to cut through the web of artificial and false
premises we have erected to justify our
inequities.

But probably not. Man has been killing his
fellow man in wars for thousands of years.
For the same amount of time, he has been
pointlessly discriminating against his brother.
Perhaps man cannot change, and will continue
to bear his Sisyphean sentence unenlightened
and full of hatred. Perhaps these are all futile
dreams, irrelevant for consideration on Christmas
or any other day. But if this is the case,
then Christmas is a hollow thing, merely
another meaningless ritual for the very young,
who haven't been around long enough to
know any better.