Editorial / Give Peace a Chance / Commencement Rites
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L GIVE PEACE A CHANCE by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. N. Perhaps I am just another "woolly-headed" liberal, dreaming of a better world mellow under sway of the golden rule; but I...
...Economic backwardness in this region is appalling...
...It is exigent that the junta sit down with all elements of the opposition and form a truly representative government...
...Some would create less of a stir on foreign campuses, and all would be safer speaking on any campus in the Soviet Union...
...For that matter, why is their presence on campus so inflammatory...
...The bloodshed could get even worse...
...It is isolated from the people, and has brought in outside military advisers from Cuba and the Soviet Union...
...ow the first place I should like to suggest a political solution is in Nicaragua...
...I endorse it...
...I agree with Cy Vance...
...There will also be demonstrators, suppressing commencement speakers and maybe even bringing violence upon them...
...Did a "military solution" ever work in Vietnam...
...Why is it so difficult to maintain order when they arrive on campus...
...I suggest they lighten their patrols along fraternity row and station a few cops in their lecture halls...
...No, strangely enough while she has been there the United Nations has been comparatively quiescent-in fact more so than when the fabulous Andy Young was our ambassador, and he was reputed to be the most honeyed diplomat ever sent to soothe the Third World...
...Is it because the Reagan Administration is on the side of the government in El Salvador and of the rebels in Nicaragua...
...Rather the speakers are usually representatives of our government or other eminent citizens with perfectly democratic views...
...The New York Times's editorial pages would be inked in purple, tears would be shed on the evening news...
...Will the Sandinistas do it...
...Let the embattled Central American governments bring their opposition into "popular front" governments so that we can get on with Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...Nicaragua's is not a very democratic government...
...Kirkpatrick is being hounded for administration policy in Central America...
...Why are my fellow liberals not enthusiastic...
...Such a plan was followed at the University of Kansas recently...
...Those are the "good conservatives...
...The Catholic Church has been harassed, and this year it was barred from broadcasting uncensored Easter week services over its own station...
...The Sandinista government has been accused of numerous abuses against human rights, of failing to hold elections, and of petty acts of corruption...
...Are they homosexuals, advocates of weird cults, or atheistic Communists...
...They could do more...
...When such conservatives express political views they cause consternation, and when they express those views forcefully they transform themselves into "arch" conservatives and very dubious characters...
...If the reports in the media are to be believed, America is now firmly on the side of revolution in Nicaragua...
...Many peasants who held rosy expectations for land reform are now bitter that the government forces them to give up their crops...
...Is a campaign being orchestrated by the New Right or that other dreadful menace to our freedoms, the Moral Majority...
...Let us get on with "a many-sided dialogue" in Central America, but I wish he and his fellow liberals would be bolder by calling for a "coalition government" in Nicaragua...
...Do they actually endorse the Sandinistas' oppression of the Miskito Indians and the Catholic Church...
...Just what kind of speakers are being driven from the podiums...
...Why should Jeane Kirkpatrick be so controversial at such liberal bastions as the University of California at Berkeley, where on February 15 she was forced from a lecture platform and made to cancel an address scheduled for the next day, while campus administrators hunkered under their desks...
...Obviously the Sandinistas are going to find themselves increasingly alienated from their own people...
...A report signed by such no-nonsense types as ex-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance,, the Rev...
...All such folk speak on campus regularly...
...During the glory days of the Carter Administration I believe it was Ambassador Andrew Young who used to urge the United States to get on the side of revolution...
...Last March organizations representing the nation's college presidents and faculty members issued a plea for tolerance...
...Every good liberal would be in his prayer chamber, and at Yale, President A. Bartlett Giamatti would be launching still more alarums against the rising intolerance of the sinister Christian Right...
...raising health standards, the Gross National Product, consciousness...
...Like their heroes in the Sandinista government and the Salvadoran revolution our campus radicals flee from normal democratic channels, abuse the majority, and turn to violence...
...Why no outcry similar to the gathering outcry for a "political solution" in El Salvador...
...Theodore Hesburgh, and Mayor Henry Cisneros of San Antonio, Texas, called for just such a confabulation last month...
...The Wall Street Journal made the suggestion in March, and it is surprising that my fellow liberals have remained mum: In a series of vivid reports the Washington Post has verified the existence of a well-organized rebel force actively opposing the Sandinista government...
...Let me tell you: indignant administrators will call in the cops with alacrity and a clear conscience when the jolly times turn overly bibulous, and it will be a stern and a magisterial university vice president who addresses the hung-over coeds and college boys the day after...
...Moreover there is that other little bug in their systems...
...Human rights are obviously in dreadful condition in Nicaragua...
...A frequent victim of campus idealists has been our chief delegate to the United Nations, Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, one of the more accomplished women to step off a college campus;-she was professor at Georgetown for a decade-and into public life...
...It is hard for them to accept conservatives as having the same moral heft as liberals, not to mention those legendary species of American dissenter, for instance the Marxist, the anarchist, the militant...
...Imagine the furor if it were...
...I am not alone...
...My guess is no, not without pressure from "world opinion...
...Actually the suppression of campus speakers has been on the rise for some time, but college officials fear it will increase with the balmy spring breezes...
...There is growing talk in liberal circles of the benefits of a "many-sided dialogue" on Central America featuring not only the region's indigenous nations but also the Reagan Administration, Cuba, and the USSR...
...Though the vast majority of university professors and administrators are well-intentioned people of carefully elaborated liberality, they are just disinclined to scotch their radicals even when the radicals act like storm troopers...
...Now, which species of campus high-jinks do you suppose will be put down more firmly by university administrators, the bawdiness and boozing or the harassment of speakers...
...Well, then, why have we not heard from the voices of world opinion...
...Has she been creating turmoil and angst at the United Nations...
...Insurgents are all over the place...
...Further, we know that there are other disenchanted elements in the country...
...Four pests were arrested and freedom reigned...
...COMMENCEMENT RITES Spring is here, and that means that on college campuses there will be beer guzzling and lewd doings on the lawns of fraternity and sorority houses...
...Of course the speakers being harassed are not all that controversial, at least not to the mainstream Americans whose tax dollars keep many of our institutions of higher learning open...
...The answer is that American universities are increasingly provinces of bitterness, extremism, and anti-democratic values...
...The women's movement is widely snickered at, and nowhere can you find a champion of gay rights who still has his front teeth intact...
...Let us have "political solutions" in Central America rather than the continued violence...
...but I believe that it is time for the antagonists in Central America to sit down at the conference table and compose their disagreements in a humane manner so that they might get on with the real business of government, which is to say: bringing progress and reform to the people...
...Do they agree with the Nicaraguan government's refusal to hold elections...
...So are health conditions...
...Yet when a minority of idealists driven by goof-ball enthusiasms shouts down a distinguished speaker or heaves debris at him, a surprising number of university administrators will find the problem very delicate indeed...
...Thousands of Miskito Indians have been uprooted, and their villages have been destroyed...
...Trying for "mili-tary solutions" is a futile business...
...Improving the quality of life here is going to be a big job, and it cannot be undertaken until there is political harmony...
...Its problems could become worse...
...These conventional liberals expect conservatives to run small businesses and dutifully pay taxes...
...Can nothing be done so that the majority of students might be free to hear the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...Sometimes it is very confusing to be a liberal...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
