RETAIN 2-S

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Having probably "come home free" via the 2-S deferment I feel a guilty presumptiveness in arguing with your editorial. "Abolish 2-S." Nevertheless, so long as one retains a selective service system, rather than total conscription or a purely voluntary army, I think your views can be strongly contested.

Higher education, it is claimed, should not be a criterion for deferment since factors of poverty or wealth are implicitly built into its present structure. This is true; but less so because higher education is barred to poor individuals (in fact it seems increasingly open to them) than because accumulated poverty and prejudice have damaged the cultural prequisites of obvious less-privileged groups. Moreover, would you not reintroduce many of the invidious distinctions you in fact condemn by yur proposal that the Peace Corps are related projects be considered as an exact equivalent to the draft? After all, these options have a far lower risk to life and limb than the armed services, and the armed forces require a much more unattractive (sometimes mindless) discipline--and this is not even considering the question of the present war.

This bears on the major argument of your editorial. While a lottery is democratic insofar as its willy-nilly incidence eliminates the privileges now incorporated in the deferment system, is such a surrender to irrational chance really so consistent with the more positive premises of democratic society? These include the attempt to shape affairs according to the desires of those concerned, and generally the faith that a certain rationality will be inherent in these choices on most imporan occasions. It is not undemocratic in these senses to draw distinctions such as 2-S has attempted; a lottery abandons the attempt as hopeless. But could not 2-S be kept and even more skillfully used to overcome some of the problems of group poverty that are the real plague of the present system? Use 2-S to broaden the base of higher education by granting it with special largesse and tolerance among those less privileged groups that may require additional encouragement. Charles S. Maier