It was so much easier to sit quietly, listen and say it wasn't worth getting all hot and bothered about. It was a position that put me at little risk. I suppose it was a position that I could control.

I PROBABLY shouldn't complain; that attitude has gotten me far in life. I've always had a lot of friends, in high school and college. I even became editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper at Harvard--in part, I'm sure, because I had very few enemies.

To be sure, neutrality served me well as a reporter. Sources trusted me because I didn't profess to have even the semblance of an opinion about things.

But the air of passivity continually got me into trouble this year when I tried to manage affairs at The Crimson. Time after time, my desire to remain above politics and avoid taking stands caused grief for everybody around me.

I remember how I presented my "objective" opinion about why a newspaper could justly print the names of gay men arrested for having anonymous sex in a public bathroom. It opened the men to heinous discrimination. It ran contrary to my sense of justice. But I justified it because it sounded like "good journalism."

It's not that I necessarily disagree with my stance, I just regret going about the issue the way that I did. Time after time, I have found myself considering what sounds correct instead of what sounds right. More often than not, that has meant neutrality, which in turn has meant complicity. My refusal to take a stand for my principles has done nothing more than enforce the status quo.

THESE DAYS, there's a new sign hanging in The Crimson's newsroom. It quotes Freire: "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."

I think it's a new sign. Who knows? Maybe it's an old sign, one I long ignored because it looked like another piece of pointless propaganda somebody hung up to impose their values upon me.

But I definitely noticed the sign last week when I was thinking about the war. I don't think I noticed it because I had some sudden realization about the nature of life, but because this time I was feeling powerless.

This time, it was me and not some nameless face standing at the bottom of that power pyramid. And from that perspective, I found, passivity and neutrality aren't so appealing.

Now, I realize that we can never treat the world with absolute "objectivity." As journalists, we must stop pretending we report and write in a vacuum and recognize that our values do motivate what we cover and the way we cover it. As human beings, we must begin to stand up for our values when they are threatened.

I only wish I had realized this five months ago, when there was still time to do something about the war in the Gulf.

EARLY ON, I supported the use of force to expel Saddam from Kuwait. I ate my daily diet of media reports and Bush Administration speeches. I quickly became convinced that we needed to act in the Gulf to preserve the world order and topple the man who might be the next Hitler.

Today, I've lost my confidence in President Bush and his coterie of National Security experts. I'm convinced that the Administration was committed to hostilities from the very start, even though peaceful alternatives may have existed. Bush dispatched the troops, set the terms and then dared Congress and the public to stop him. The public cowered, and Bush's army rolled on.

I'm also convinced that this war is going to be far more costly--both in terms of the geo-political order and human suffering--than any of us have been led to believe. Who knows what price we will pay for our sudden understanding toward Syrian treachery and the Soviet military crackdown in the Baltics (remember it was our forgiving attitude toward Iraq that got us into this mess to begin with). And God only knows how many people will die when Bush gives the go-ahead for the grand ground offensive into Kuwait.