University of Virginia Library

And The War Goes On

Lingering illusions of Happiness Day aside,
May thus far has been anything but the
"merry month" we were accustomed as
children to expect. It was Nicholas Von
Hoffman who noted yesterday, "what was
lost was that in this land where we have to
beg people to register to vote, 7,000 persons,
count 'em, 7,000, had gone out and incurred
arrest for something they believe in."

That was Monday. On Tuesday, 2,000
more got busted beneath John Mitchell's
Justice balcony, and as this is written another
thousand or so are being seized at the Capitol.
Washington's municipal bureaucracy, like the
country it governs and the war it continues to
direct, has an amazing capacity for absorbing
large numbers and massive shock. Like its
President, the capital is not easily
"intimidated."

* * * * *

If the Mayday actions betrayed a tone of
pronounced desperation, at least there was
nothing quiet about them. Noise and
disruption may never end the war; indeed, if
Senator Scott is right, nothing short of
election day will satisfy Nixon that the time
to halt the killing has arrived. But this ignores
a central consideration overlooked by the
war makers: the war does not belong solely to
Nixon and Kissinger and their military
advisors, and neither does responsibility for it.
It's our war and our guilt as well. For the past
three weeks that awesome (and growing)
burden has been articulated in a variety of
ways by the people who cared enough to go
to Washington. If one was unable or unwilling
to go himself, then he could rest assured that
the Army of Peace, as Von Hoffman called it,
was there to say and do the things which
decency demands.

When the last American and the last Asian
finally die in Indochina, the question will
remain: What was so compelling about
November 1972 that the country, and
especially the President, could not detect in
May of 1971? Answer that one, and the very
worst and best of what few would deny has
been an insane decade might begin to merge
in some semblance of reason, even order.
Until such time we will continue to exist on
the margins of police barricades, discovering
more and more that obstruction at home is
but a natural response to apparently endless
genocide abroad.

Washington was not shut down. But
America, at least, was reminded of the
growing sense of outrage; and that, History
may show, is a fact for which we can be
thankful.

* * * * *

Lethargic Charlottesville held a note of
sharp contrast for students returning from the
front in D.C. A certain air of self-satisfied
complacency has prevailed all spring, and we
might suggest to Nixon and the generals that
the next "Vietnam" be held here. Surely few
would be bothered, if anyone even happened
to notice it at all.