Shanties

To the Editors of The Crimson:

If you lived in the slums of New York City and I went to live for a while in the slums of Boston, would you feel better? Would you feel that I respected your human dignity, your right to suffer without being imitated or patronized by my temporary and unequal suffering?

If you were living in a mock shantytown in Harvard Yard and I wrote a letter explaining that I had once thought about living in a mock shantytown in my backyard, would you feel better? If I claimed to understand how much you were sacrificing and suffering in your mock shantytown, would you feel supported? Would you feel respected?

Let's make things clearer. If you were living in a Nazi concentration camp and I built a mock concentration camp in Harvard Yard so that your relatives could see it every day as they walked to economics class, would you feel better? Would your family feel better? What if I played folk songs about freedom and organized my friends to sleep in the camp with me and passed out brochures and showed pictures of you suffering? Would you feel supported or would you feel objectified and patronized; your family mocked and outraged?

Instead of applying our voices to mindless chants and our bodies to melodramatic renovation of Harvard Yard, let's use our minds--or at least our common sense--to act through focused, non-offensive methods. If we want to show Black South Africans our sympathy, let's not objectify hem or mock their suffering, sensitive families in America. If we want to pressure the Harvard administration to divest, let's act directly, instead of play acting in fron of University Hall like over-eager children.

But perhaps we are limited n what we can be. Perhaps we must resign ourselves to subsistence as well-intentioned Harvard students who trample upon the dignity of those human beings whom we try to help, just as we trample upon the grass of Harvard Yard. We must forgive our ignorance as we try to establish an "open campus"--a place of spirituality, freedom and peace--by placing large boards against trees in Harvard Yard and posting advertisements all over them to welcome our less enlightened brethren.

If we can only be what we are, let's minimize the damage. Let's get our mock campus, our mock shantytown, our mocking concern out of Harvard Yard. Let's be respectful. Let the grass grow. Arthur K. Park '86-'87