God Save the Country

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Well, it was extremely funny, wasn't it -- about as hilarious as a Nazi Jew flogging would be. Unquestionably, nothing is so diverting as brutally to mistreat a group of earnest, serious men who are giving their time and services in the cause of a humanitarian ideal. On the other hand it requires very little courage to heckle and boo and pelt grapefruit from the comforting security of the crowd, and clowning always draws approbation. The next logical step would be to overturn the hearse at a funeral amid shouts of laughter.

No one objects to fun, but God in Heaven, there is a place and time for it. Will you tell me what is funny about war? What is funny about Bubonic Plague? The CRIMSON'S campaign of advertising and publicity for the crowd of peanut brains who disrupted Friday's meeting was nicely calculated to attract all the lunatic fringe to turn out in expectation of a royal Roman holiday. The gleeful reporting fraternity and cameramen cooperated to make the flasco a howling success. The University had given the National Students League permission to hold the meeting; it had not given such permission to the counter-demonstration. Therefore the University is utterly to blame for not instructing the Yard police to break up the clowning before it started. An assembly of African savages could not conceivably have misbehaved so badly as Friday's crowd of supposedly educated men.

Moreover, the CRIMSON states editorially that Friday's demonstration with its rowdyism is a testimonial to the uselessness of emotional appeals. Instead of making emotional appeals the speakers warned against mob hysteria and emphasized the need for clear and cool-headed thinking. The CRIMSON concedes that pacifistic groups should organize and be enthusiastic. How is it to be done without holding public meetings when one hasn't the money for claborate publicity campaigns and printing? Why haven't pacifists the right to demand police protection if necessary to insure that their meetings shall be as dignified and orderly as any other public gathering is required to be?

There is a group of carefree young men in our midst for whom the consideration for one moment of a serious thought would be an ennui too great to be borne. For such, anything so hopelessly antediluvian as an ideal is excruciatingly funny. Well, gentlemen, it is not without the bounds of possibility for this tremendous joke to turn into a poetically just and ghastly ironic nightmare. If the country's future is to be guided by the harebrains which Friday's farce disclosed--God help the country. Sedgwick Mead '34.