Word: memos
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...hereby ordered for induction to the Armed Forces of the United States," read the memo I received in the mail last Friday. "You are to report at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School on 11/18/89 at 8:00 a.m." I quickly tossed it in the trash...
...memo, sent by Harvard's Committee on Central America (COCA) to 900 male undergraduates, was cleverly designed to play upon the public outrage generated by the brutal murders of six Jesuit priests last week by right-wing death squads in El Salvador...
Granted, COCA's underlying intention of calling our attention to the atrocities of the past week is, by itself, noble. No one with sympathy for the people of El Salvador can justify what happened. Why, then, was I so quick to throw out the memo? And why do I feel so compelled to denounce COCA's strategy...
More significantly, however, COCA's distribution of the memo was an irresponsible attempt to generate hysteria among undergraduates when, given the current inequities in our system of military service, there was clearly no need to do so. It also represented another example of COCA's highly selective and skewed portrayal of current events in Central America and of the United States' role in them...
HOWEVER, what was most immediately repugnant about the COCA memo I received last week was the attitude it conveyed and, more particularly, the scare tactics it employed to conjure up images of another Vietnam War. Yet these scare tactics seemed woefully misguided--after all, Vietnam was a time when thousands of elitist students burned their draft cards and graciously let the poor and minorities do the fighting for them...