<<You are more guilty because you recognized the beast and your feeble attempts couldn't stop it.
<<You knew. You read about it, you wrote about it, you formed alliances about it. You knew your efforts were feeble and you didn't take it to the next level. Your efforts were more about feeling good about yourself and less about killing the beast.>>
Fair enough. The "next level" was bombing American cities, "bringing the war home." No, I didn't take it to the next level.
You're wrong about one thing, though. My efforts initially weren't about feeling good about myself. They were born out of absolute feelings of horror and anger that I had when I read Toronto Star accounts of the torture of prisoners and a few TIME magazine articles, one in particular about an elderly grandmother dying of napalm burns, another about a VC platoon shredded by some fairly sophisticated weaponry, where you could see exactly what someone writing years later (The Greening of America) meant when he wrote of "war by the rich and powerful against the poor and helpless." That was exactly what I felt reading that TIME magazine article, that the rich and the powerful were at war with the poor and the helpless, and I knew in the very core of my being how just plain wrong that was.
I probably could have done more. That's what I'm guilty of, not doing more. Not staying in the fight longer.
But what YOU are guilty of is infinitely worse - - you supported the war, you did nothing to oppose it, and you opposed, ridiculed and challenged those who did oppose it.
To put all this another way - - I was, and still am, in howsoever small a way, a part of the solution, whereas YOU, my friend, unfortunately are very much a part of the problem. Thus, although I do feel some guilt at not doing all that I could have done, it's matched by some little pride at what little I did; you, OTOH, have nothing to be proud of and everything to be ashamed of. My guilt is leavened with some pride; yours is absolute.
