Christopher Brower wrote a cynical opinion piece (Mass gatherings not enough to affect true societal change
April 8) denouncing the Athens die-in last Wednesday as an irrelevant and old-fashioned protest. But he should have done a bit more investigative reporting work before publishing. Helen Horn, Art Gish, Peggy Gish, Robert Whealey, Michael O'Brien, Kari Genter-Seymour, Andrew van den Bergh, Jason Heinrich, Christie Truly and other protesters cannot be dismissed as people lacking any sense of political history.
What follows Brower's first paragraph with the headline-grabbing opening are five vague paragraphs about Vietnam youth movements the market place and the 1960s. Mere name-dropping does not add up to much political history.
Throughout Brower's letter is the use of the word we
apparently speaking of his fellow Ohio University generation, 2001-2005. Some of those university students joined people from town, and even a veteran from as far away as Indiana, in protesting the killing of Americans and Iraqis. The die-in was trying to shake indifference to the costs of this tragic war, which has no end in sight. The reading of names and the tombstones led-in to four substantive talks about conditions in Iraq and lost funding of social services in Ohio diverted to occupying and fighting in Iraq.
Use of the subjective and authoritarian word we explains no history or politics. The first lesson of those who would write a letter concerning history is to drop the term we
and write about real people at Ohio University, in Iraq, in Israel and in Washington, like Donald Rumsfeld, etc. The readers need to know what the politicians and the warriors did and what they said. Let the Ohio University community work to restore peace to America by becoming more politically and historically minded.
-Robert H. Whealey is an emeritus associate professor in history at Ohio University. Send him an e-mail at whealey@ohiou.edu.
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