Interesting opinion article on admissions policy

mini
Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:19:15 +0000

I understand that view. I think you would see more in the tragedy if you did a little bit more research about Diane Oughton.

I put no truck in bombmaking: as I noted, I am a pacifist, and when my SDS friends went off the deep end, I went on down a completely different path to becoming a pacifist publisher, more in keeping with Swattie Diane DiPrima than Swattie Cathy. I think, more than anything else, they were “stupid”. But I also understand the scale of killing, and the more than 3 million Vietnamese of all political persuasions who died (most as innocent bystanders set upon by both sides), and I know about Oughton’s experience in Guatemala at a pretty close secondhand (though it is a VERY long time ago), and I know of my own experiences in Iran and friends who were tortured by the SAVAK, trained in torture at Fort Benning, and tortured as Americans looked on and coached, and I think all must be weighed in justice’s scales.

(And, for all we know, Oughton was at the apartment trying to PREVENT the bombmaking when the things went off. People who knew her much better than I did (which was not very well - I think we met twice, and it was years earlier), and the other people in the house, suggest that this could very well have been the case, in which case you might be calling her a hero. Be careful when you judge.)