Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Date:         Mon, 25 Jan 1993 20:36:28 -0500
              USENET." <VIETNET@USCVM.BITNET>
From:         Hai Phan <phan@CS.BU.EDU>
Subject:      Our Scarce Resources Are Being Wasted

        Dear SCVers,

        I hope you all enjoyed the New Year's Day abroad, I had a great
time at the New Year Festival organized by the Intercollegiate
Vietnamese Students Association at Massachusttes (not sure that's the
right official name).

        Please correct me if I am wrong, most of SCVers are sick and
tired of the verbal wars that are commonplace on this net. How are we
going to rebuild Vietnam if we are destroying everything that we have
left? Of course all of us want what we think is best our country and our
people, but does that give us the right to insult everyone who disagrees
with us? Definitely not. I have been lucky enough to stay out of this
mess and follow the discussion on whether or not we should go back to
Vietnam to help unemotionally and unbiasedly, I would like to pose some
questions for the participants in order to make peace, or at least stop
the verbal warfare.

        1-Rebuilding Vietnam is an extremely difficult task, it requires
cooperation from every Vietnamese, especially those who are lucky enough
to have the potential to contribute more than the average person, namely
those who are lucky enough to have a college education. If you think you
can achieve your full potential without cooperating with others,
consider this: You and a few friends of yours just wrote a new operating
system that you predict (correctly) will enable the Vietnamese software
industry (and your company/group) to be a dominant player in the market
for sometime, if you have the capital to market and distribute it (you
don't). Now, suppose the guys you had been calling all sort of names
since you began the discussion years ago own a large chain of software
stores throughout Vietnam, have a sizable amount of surplus money, and
have good joint venture partnership with their former employers who have
international software distributing power.  Wouldn't you wish that you
didn't behave in a such self-defeating manner in the past? Of course,
the guys who own the store in this hypothetical, but not unlikely,
situation would wish that they didn't call you any name too because they
would miss such a knockout hit. This is only one of thousands and
thousands of similar situations that we are likely to encounter in the
future.

        2-Brain power and time are our most potent resources, we must to
use them wisely. Wouldn't our fellow countrymen/women be much better of
if we spend time writing softwares, business plans, or do something
concrete that forces the Viet Cong to honor human rights instead of
spending hours thinking of names to call our opponents and those who
disagree with us?

        3-Why do we keep thinking that helping our fellow Vietnamese
economically has to be incopatible to helping them politically? Why
don't those who want the Viet Cong to honor human rights do their best
to make sure that the Communist government wouldn't dare to harrass
those who come back to Vietnam to help people there so that they can
inspire the people at home to demand for human rights and freedom the we
all cherish here? We need one another, don't we?

        I would like to stop here because the message is getting long
now and I believe that everyone can find at least ten more reasons that
we should not go on with the verbal warfare. My only purpose in this
message is to give a wrong turn signal so that we can stop wasting our
scarce resources and put them to work for a free and prosperous Vietnam
immediately.

                                                Best wishes,

                                                Ha?i Phan