LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Re: “Where is the voice of our generation?,” 2/1

I believe Sam Rega needs to rethink his position before criticizing the opinions of young people in this country. There are some large flaws in his comparisons to the ’60s and the Vietnam War. First, during Vietnam the draft was instituted because the military needed more soldiers and young people did not want to fight; they felt we did not belong there. The main reason for this is that we were not provoked by Vietnam nor attacked by them. However, everyone can remember what happened on 9/11 and are filled with rage. Now you can say that Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al-Qaeda, but can you prove it? No. The truth is that everyone knows that Saddam is a bad person (he tried to have the first President Bush assassinated) and that the world is better without him. Second, in Vietnam we lost 58,000 soldiers over a 10-year period. That is on average 483 deaths a month. In this conflict, we have only lost 1,400 soldiers in over a year and a half. If we needed to reinstitute the draft due to the loss of 1,400 soldiers, then we have no business invading anyone to begin with. The truth is that most people are glad to see our military in action and working hard on foreign soil to keep us safe here at home. What Rega fails to realize is that the young people of today do not want to protest because the circumstances are totally different than they were during the ’60s and Vietnam. My opinion is formed, and I, along with many others, feel we are doing the right thing. We have spoken, thus the reason G. W. Bush was re-elected. If Rega thinks we are not doing the right thing by punishing evildoers, and that we are in fact the evildoers, then perhaps he should sit down and watch the videos of the planes hitting the WTC and the Pentagon again and then ask himself if we deserved that. Are we Americans so evil that we deserved to be attacked the way we were? Some of us are willing to fight for what we believe in, and we do it different ways. Some, like myself, sign up to join the Marines, or the Army, Navy or Air Force. Others voice their anger towards terrorists in other ways, but we have made our voices heard, and we say that we will not stand idly by and be driven into fear by people who hate everything that we stand for.

Brad Tatum

Student