Indian legend Mahatma Ghandi; Latino activist Cesar Chavez; civil rights activist/nutritionist/comedian Dick Gregory; and the “Ten Men Dead,” the Irish freedom fighters that included MP Bobby Sands, were, according to the insensitive and uncaring among us at Iowa State University, “suicidal” and “terrorists.”

These men surely would not have won support in our GSB because they were “hurting themselves” and thus unworthy of a resolution supporting their causes, which, in each case, involved struggling on behalf of those disfranchised, a concept little understood by some here at ISU.

Allan Nosworthy walks in good company with these “suicidal terrorists” who, to the more enlightened, used the hunger strike as an act of conscience.

In “The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966 to 1996 and the Search for Peace,” author Tim Pat Coogan describes hunger strikes this way.

“It is a practice which has its roots deep in Irish history and is found also in Hindu tradition.

“Both the earlier Celts and the Hindus used self-immolation by starvation as a means of discrediting someone who had done them wrong.”

Many are angry about the tensions — already there — that have been brought to the surface in the past two years. They would prefer what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “a negative peace.” The words “preferential treatment” and “reverse discrimination” spill from the lips of some.

From 1619 to 1964, preferential treatment, set-asides and what one might call “original discrimination” was never an issue for the majority, except for doing all they could to maintain it by gun, whip and lynching rope.

Now, in a generation, some who enjoy the legacy of preferential treatment say “enough” of this affirmative action business and wish to return to its obverse: negative action.

For them, the playing field has been leveled in the past 33 years from 350 years of unimaginable horror, and if it hasn’t, well, that’s just too bad.

It’s sad to see college students with so poor a grasp of history and little understanding of tradition when it’s not involving a drunkfest.

I guess to understand an act of conscience, a person has to have one.

Milton McGriff

Graduate student

Creative writing