Moderation in all things

There have always been people who say war is moral and that might makes right.

On the other side, there are people who totally condemn acts of violence and the use of force. The debate will not end with this editorial nor will I be able to describe in detail what it is that excites me about the spirit of détente, which is the lessening of tensions and the overall foreign policy of President Richard Nixon.

Still, the basic idea that I want you to realize is that not supporting a policy does not mean that you are somehow anti-American. This is why everyone needs to vote, and it is one of the most patriotic things you could do.

The fact is that there are ways other than the use of force to achieve the goal of supporting democracy, because the highest goal of nonviolence is to get the right to vote. Nonviolence is about persuading people to come over the fence. Being nonviolent and respecting others' right to be different is the right thing to do. In short, nonviolence means there is hope for a political solution. As a result, nonviolence is a moderate view, and leads to moderation. This is the goal of détente, the concept that resulted in our winning the Cold War.

War isn't necessarily moral, simply because you want to achieve something good with it. Democracy is good, and we should support democracy. But a democracy can't exist where there has never been a history of nonviolence. Nonviolence is the foundation for democracy. This is why you need to support moderate candidates who are more likely to support more creative ways to promote democracy in this election.

Violence is evolutionary. Nonviolence is revolutionary. The evidence of this is the success of Mahatma Gandhi's fight to free the people of India from British colonial rule. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently of the theory of nonviolence in the fi ght for African- American civil rights. These examples prove that these onceradical ideas work in the real world, and that means nonviolence works as well.

The more moderate point of view is that we should be involved in the world diplomatically, realizing that we're not the only country in the world that can be moral. We have to respect other countries' sovereignty and realize that you can't shove democracy down other peoples' throats; that democracy is a cultural fact, not just a political fact.

The spirit of détente should include the use of sanctions, because to create a democracy with the military is virtually impossible by itself alone. The culture of democracy takes time to develop. Take, for example, the United States in the 1780s, before the constitution became law. The experiment of a confederation didn't work. And so, improvements were made via a better constitution that's lasted 200 years. But it wasn't an all-atonce process. We had to develop our own culture of democracy.

America needs to understand that our government can't work without nonviolence, because that's ultimately what democracy is all about.

Don't vote for the extreme candidates who would only make our country weaker and threaten our ability to have any influence in the world.

Become familiar with your history, and vote based on what you know to be the truth. That is what it means to live for democracy, and that is the best thing you can do to support our own democratic traditions at home and abroad.

— Joseph Kastner is a NLC journalism student and member of the Journalism Club.