March for El Salvador

THIS THURSDAY, Harvard students will march by candlelight through the Yard and through Cambridge to protest American military aid to El Salvador. We urge every member of the "Harvard community"--students, faculty, workers and even administrators--to join, to add their numbers now and help swell this crucial movement.

It is hard to understand how people could support our conduct in El Salvador, a nation where the government and officially tolerated right-wing hoodlums kill thousands and hold millions more in terror. It is moving testimony to the courage of the El Salvadoran people that their resistance to this tyranny continues, indeed prospers, despite the huge influx of American military technology.

And it is our shame as a nation that we make the people of this small country--who want nothing more, it seems, than a government like that of their neighbor Nicaragua--continue to fight. Our complicity--as tax-payers, as voters--is overwhelming. Of late, though, it has become fashionable to praise that complicity--we are finally "getting over" the "Vietnam syndrome." We are ready to throw our weight around again.

But then, the powers that be were happy with our involvement in Vietnam, too. It took outsiders--beginning with college students--to turn the tide against that war. We must show the nation that we will make the same sacrifices again--and exact the same price of social unrest, if need be. If America's leaders did not learn their lesson in Vietnam, then the committed and concerned in this country will have to teach it to them again. Thursday's march is a beginning, and all of Harvard should be there.