Word: cocas
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...comes to the draft. What I found out when I called the senator's office was that almost 100 other people who received the notices had also been sufficiently alarmed to call. It was then that I decided that this action posed by the Committee on Central America (COCA) was not an issue about El Salvador but an issue about freedoms here at Harvard...
...groups have been formed to raise awareness about these issues, and some have been more successful than others. Apparently, however, the plethora of groups involved in tabling, postering, organizing meetings and holding rallies has made it increasingly difficult to grab the average student's attention. Because of this fact, COCA took the attention-grabbing step of placing falsified draft notices with a forged signature of Senator Kerry in the mailboxes of 900 undergraduate...
...November 28 Crimson, Daniel Baer explained that "Harvard students are bored with tabling and rallies. That's why COCA's recent actions were so appropriate." It is difficult to understand how undergraduate apathy with regard to the El Salvador issue makes the draft notices so appropriate. It might be true that many students have not involved themselves with COCA's cause, and this is probably true for a variety of reasons: perhaps some students who work in addition to studying just plain don't care (though that is hard to believe). The point is that these people (myself included) have...
Baer seems proud of the effectiveness of COCA's draft notices. He says that "It is understandable that some students have been frightened or upset by COCA's recent tactics. But their fear and anger should not be ultimately directed at COCA." He says instead that we should direct our anger at the right-wing terror of our government. I happen to agree with him that the current administration is on the wrong side of the Central America issue--but it is not up to me or Baer to scare the daylights out of those who disagree with...
Many of my liberal friends (being a liberal myself) tell me that this is a free speech issue, and that COCA has a right to express their views to me. I disagree that free speech is involved at all. My conception of the constitutional freedom of speech is that, as far as consent is concerned, anything goes. I think that the public political discourse must be completely free of censorship and limitation. But my draft notice was not in the public discourse; it was a private communication, addressed to me and placed in my locked mailbox. For me, this makes...