I envy the people who went to that rally and the ones held before it. They will always know that they spoke their minds from the start. They realized all along what they believed in, and they stood up for it.
The rest of us will have no such consolation. We may have had the opportunity to object, but we chose to let it slip away. We remained silent. Now we must face the consequences of our indifference.
IF THIS WAR turns sour--and I am almost certain it will--I suppose we can always tell ourselves that we didn't really believe everything we were being told, even though we kept our reservations to ourselves. I'm sure that will make us feel better in 30 years, when all we have to remember are a few pages in some history book and a military cemetary conveniently hidden in some far-away town.
I'm sure many of us will hardly remember back to the awful suffering that lies ahead. The human mind is very good at blocking out unpleasant things when they have happened to somebody else many years earlier.
Someday, we will all forget--and that is the scariest thing of all.
Jonathan S. Cohn '91 was president of The Crimson.