What's keeping the protesters away

AS ONE of the "gray heads" who continues to drag himself out to antiwar protests, I have to disagree with James Carroll's assessment of why public resistance to Washington's latest war is so tepid.

It's not the fading of nuclear war anxiety that keeps people off the streets, but the pervasive feeling that there's no side where one can honestly throw one's lot. It would be much easier to support the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and assassination, even with the response of suicide bombings, if one didn't see Palestinians treating one another just as violently. It would be easier to support Iraqis working against the US attempts to dictate their fate if one saw a single-minded struggle against the occupier, rather than factions trying to better the Americans in indiscriminate killing. It seems as if the idea of humane struggle is nowhere to be found. It doesn't help to say US activists have to look to the crimes of our own government when the whole world seems to be in a melting pot of cruelty, with no group showing a better way.

ED AGRO
Allston