I think this has been a rational process on our part. We have come to our conclusion slowly and painfully. We have lost confidence, because we do not believe any longer that these institutions are reformable.
JUDGE: Well, if you are saying that you are advocating revolution...
And the nine themselves, heroically passionate in their humanity, were driven to an action while they recognized the futility of that action:
MARJORIE MELVILLE:
I know that burning draft files
is not an effective way to stop a war but
who has found a way
of stopping this war
I have racked my brain
I have talked to all kinds of people
What can you do
They say yes yes
but there is no answer
no stopping it the horror continues
The immorality of the Vietnamese war has become a cliche. Even those opposed to the war no longer go back to the screaming bloody concrete facts of the conflict. How can we emotionally respond to a seemingly endless series of burned villages, burned babies, mass slayings of civilians? We become spiritually calloused, deadened, unable to face another newsclip of a dying soldier squirming in the mud he has reddened with his blood and intestines, or of ten thousand bodies floating down the Mekong River to the sea. The seven men and two women at Catonsville could not forget.