THERE IS LITTLE that can be done about this except abdicate, abjure, ask to be excused--from certain dialogues, communities, and societies, from the sheltering "we"s that we inhabit, that constitute our friends, families and countries. It is a request that I am making, that I don't even expect to be granted.

Gandhi would not grant it. "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts," he said, "than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence." King would not grant it. And the Tolstoy who thought the time was coming for the end of war, well, what would he want with an unrepentant sinner like me, who hasn't even the courage to be anti-Christian?

What would Tolstoy or one of the others say if he knew Gary J. Bass '92 and Hazem Ben-Gacem '92, roommates who were touted by The Crimson as a model of Jewish-Arab communication and cooperation last November, and who appeared grinning together in a huge page three photograph, could no longer even live together, and separated?

Which returns my gaze to the wreckage. Out of all these broken things, I pull pieces for my collection, detritis, filed away and rigorously catalogued. The architects of cowardice come from all sides: the pacifists, Albert Camus, Kurt Schwitters, Ilya Kabakov, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ross McElwee's "Sherman's March," Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker," Robert Oppen-heimer, Ella Baker. It is not much, but, as King said in '67, "Now there is little left to build on--save bitterness."

I AM MORE THAN WILLING to share these fragments with you (I'm in the book), even though I know they can always be used against me in the court of reason. Contradictions: my populism and my social paranoia. I am a product of my environment that does not sell.

So much for the possibility of an apology for this life. What about you and yours? Not only you who would follow George Bush or anyone else to your death, who would follow them to the deaths of others, who would yourselves lead others to death, who would become an element in the determination of the "kill ratio." But you who would make me think like you or not think at all, who want me to "grow up," "stick it out," "take it like a man," who will think that it took guts even to print this, who will never understand what I thought the moment I, too, considered enlisting in this great mistake. To all of you: you leave me cold.