The analysis by professional mystifiers at Time Magazine not-withstanding, most Harvard students still adhere to this hazy left-liberalism. Polls taken last Fall indicated that more than 70 per cent of Harvard's student body intended to vote for George McGovern for president, so it seems the making of a coalition still existed, and no apparent obstacles blocked a radical-liberal activist campaign this Spring.

But then the war ended, and with it ended the immediate chances for a successful activist upsurge. No sane person would exchange a resumption of the genocide in Vietnam for the increased activist prospects it would bring to Harvard, but no new formula for unity was found to replace the old one. NAM sputtered about, groping for a new basis for the old alliance.

Whether such a synthesis can be achieved at Harvard after Vietnam is an open question. The war presented us with a stark contrast between good and evil, a contrast which blurs into varying shades of grey on other issues. The criminal apocalypses that seemed so imminent at many junctures over the past decade tend to appear juvenile in retrospect. With the war nearly over, the imperatives for action are less obvious, less strident.

VIETNAM HAS CHANGED the lives of all of us. It has illuminated the yawning chasm between our government's professed ideals and its conduct. It has forced us to examine more closely our society and our history, searching for an explanation for the decade of genocide.

At the same time that Vietnam painted the contradictions of American society in blood-red, it hinted at a way out of the impasse. The Vietnamese have prevailed. They have gone several steps further toward winning their freedom and are now in the process of constructing a socialist society of freedom, humanity, equality and justice across all Vietnam. Though the tactics of their struggle have little immediate relevance to the tasks before us in a modernized society, their success in the face of insurmountable odds gives us heart that those tasks can be accomplished in America.

Despite their battling in the inferno, the Vietnamese have not lost their humanity. The violence which for decades they have been forced to content with and resort to has not obscured their goals or tarnished their ultimate vision. Vietnam will be free, and Vietnam has taught America the price and the value of freedom.