To the Editor:

I have trouble making sense of the opinion piece written by Harry Flaster ’05 (“Are you for God, for County, and for Yale?” 2/11). He says it “disgusts” him to see students staging a die-in to protest the war in Iraq because he believes it disrespects those who fought in previous wars. Why? An individual’s opposition to a given war tells us nothing about what the individual feels about previous wars or the Americans who fought in them. Mr. Flaster does not provide a single reason to believe otherwise. He also criticizes “political correctness” and “moral relativism” without connecting those criticisms in any way to the protesters’ message. What makes him so sure that the protesters aren’t taking what they believe to be a moral, patriotic stance in opposing the war?

Although Mr. Flaster emphatically states that what disturbs him is not simply the protesters’ views on American foreign policy, his inability to articulate any other reason for his disgust leads one to believe otherwise.

Michael Kavey ’00 LAW ’04

February 11, 2003