Yesterday, I woke up thinking of Edgar Derby and found that the memory of his death has not dimmed in 29 years.

On a beautiful Southern California afternoon, late in the year of our lord 1976, I sat in a classroom on the campus of Occidental College and listened as professor Atchity led the class in a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse 5. We had just read the chapter in which POWs Billy Pilgrim and his intellectual friend, Edgar Derby, are being forced by their captors to comb the fire-bombed ruins of Dresden in the search for bodies. Edgar finds a carved Dresden porcelain figurine, perfectly unharmed. Excited and awed by this beautiful little reminder of man's creativity, spirituality and redeeming qualities in the midst of devastation and horror, Edgar picks it up and shows it to Billy. A German soldier immediately seizes him and drags him to the nearest wall, where a quickly assembled firing squad executes him for looting.

"What do you make of this scene,?" asked professor Atchity.

Due to the intervening years, I couldn't say now if a fellow student first came up with the interpretation and the teacher endorsed it, or if the teacher floated the notion and the students assented. Either way, a general consensus formed that Edgar Derby got what was coming to him. He was a looter. There were rules about looting. He knew the rules. He broke the rules. That's what happens when you break the rules.

There was an edge to this analysis. It was not delivered in the manner of a palms-up shrug and sorrowful shake of the head. It was not tinged with regret, but vehemence. My fellow students were into it: Edgar Derby was a loser who just couldn't get with the program.

The prof nodded, agreed that we had correctly parsed the meaning of the passage, and moved on.

I sat waiting for the punchline, the hand at the academic tiller that would firmly steer this suddenly wayward vessel back from dark waters and into the light of rational discourse and maybe some regard for the plain intent of the author. It never came. The professor agreed with the students--my academic colleagues, my generation, the sons and daughters of the middle to upper-middle class. And they weren't just Good Germans. They were Very Good Germans.

To this day, I find that I am still hoping one or two other things happened: 1) everyone in that classroom who said nothing was feeling exactly what I was feeling, and/or 2) before class, professor Atchity got together with the five or six students who later actively participated in the discussion and said "I want you to help me perform a little sociology experiment today...."

But I know that's not what happened. We were students and a teacher discussing the assigned reading. The prof was not measuring the silence in the room and strolling back to his office to pen monographs on The New Conformity, the Death of Empathy, or the Acquiescence of Today's Youth to Authority in Any Form.

We were one year out of Vietnam, four years away from Reagan and Morning in America. Already we had been told that the lesson of Vietnam's two million dead was that the next time we fought a senseless, immoral war for delusional reasons, we must fight to win. That same year, a young Don Rumsfeld, in his first go-round as Secretary of Defense, had re-invigorated the Cold War, telling the country that Russia was embarked on a program to develop terrifying super-weapons that would leave us defenseless and vulnerable, and that the absence of any evidence that they were doing so was evidence of how well they were concealing the evidence.

It was as though he had stepped out of a novel by Vonnegut or Joseph Heller -- authors who might have justifiably hoped that their work, as widely read cultural touchstones, had contributed somewhat to the formation of young minds, instilling the idea, for instance, that it is unwise to put your fate in the hands of dangerous clowns pushing a mad ideology, or that guys like Edgar Derby don't deserve to be shot. Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 were on the syllabus for Contemporary American Fiction at every major college and university in the country. And yet, here we are.

And they're pretty much running the show now, my old college chums. They are the managers, associates, administrators and vp's; the software engineers, little league coaches, lawyers, reporters and teachers. They voted in the last election. They'll vote in the next one. They vote in the majority. They listen as they are told that a nation that has posed no threat to any other country for over a decade but possesses vast oil reserves is also in possession of weapons of mass destruction and must be invaded and occupied. They listen as they are told this is part of a War on Terror. They listen as the manifest falsity of the stated reason for the war is explained as an honest mistake, easily replaced with other reasons.

They listen as they are told that the forced expansion of a virulently predatory form of capitalism worldwide equals the spreading of freedom and democracy. They listen as they are told that the further enrichment of the richest is sound economic policy; that the bankrupting of the government and slashing of social and environmental programs is about the encouragement of thrift and volunteerism.

They listen as they are told that a "three strikes" law that puts people away for life for stealing a pizza is necessary to keep violent felons off the street and must be maintained; that illegal immigrants -- forced into this country by those aforementioned predatory practices that drive farmers into bankruptcy and the ranks of migrant labor -- must not be coddled with driver's licenses, medical care and schooling for their children, for that makes the life of indolence that is poverty in our country too attractive and draws more of them here.

They listen, they nod, and move on. Edgar Derby, they know, was collateral damage, at most. And, technically, he was a looter. He buttered his bread. The rules are given to us. They are to be followed. Beyond that, all that is necessary is our silence.

Reason enough to get out to every peace rally you can, to back the only hope we have for the future: the 18-to-25-year-olds who are also the power behind the anti-sweatshop and global justice movements, the initiatives for fair-trade coffee and against the frankenfood fraud of biotech.

For some reason, they are different from the Occidental College class of '80. For all our sakes, let's hope they stay that way.

Andrew Christie (achris63@hotmail.com) is an environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA.

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