At Justin Herman Plaza yesterday, as business women and men hurried home from their daily grind, students from various Bay Area institutions rallied against military recruitment in their schools. Responding to a call for action sounded by the Campus Antiwar Network, they gathered to inform our federal government that its members cannot intimidate schools that refuse and evict military recruiters.
This protest and similar ones across the country coincided with the U.S. Supreme Court’s hearing of arguments for and against the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment in Rumsfeld v. FAIR (Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights). Enacted in 1995 and named after its sponsor Gerald Solomon, a Republican from New York, the Solomon Act is a federal law allowing the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent military recruitment on campus.
But violence is not what we should be teaching our children, said guest speaker Aimee Allison, with Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. A veteran of the Persian Gulf War, she argued that schools should be a place for perusing education and for looking creatively at the world around them.
“We need to get in the faces of these recruiters and say “Get the Hell out,”” Allison said. “They can not be allowed to bring their violent practices to our learning institutions.”
Julia Waters, a member of United Students for Global Justice, agreed and said that their doing so is merely an intimidation tactic used so they can maintain ranks.
“But they’re not going to maintain them for much longer because people have doubts – they have doubts about our government and the general legitimacy of our going to war,” Waters said.
Indeed, a Nov. 30, 2005 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 55 percent of its 606 American adults did not believe President Bush has a plan that will achieve victory for the United States in Iraq. Moreover, 54 percent felt that Bush’s overall handling of the war has been poor.
Waters said such a change in public opinion is one of the reasons why recruiters now have to force their way onto campuses. In fact, recruitment numbers for this year are the lowest they’ve been since 1979, she said.
“Young people see what happened in Vietnam and what’s happening now and are making the connection,” said Waters.
Ryan Harvey, with Riot-Folk, a collective of radical musicians, is one such person. He performed his piece, “Open Song to the U.S. Occupying Forces,” which opens with, “The war is over, that’s what they say, and they’re making sure the media presents it all that way. You see they learned from the war in Vietnam that you don’t let the people see what’s really going on.”
Forest John said that as was the case with the Vietnam War, recruiters for this war are defrauding young people into the military and then destroying their lives.
“But we can’t just say Vietnam this and Vietnam that,” said John. “It has to be more – we have to figure out what worked and what didn’t.”
For now, what’s working is a rise of students against political pressure to join a war in which they do not believe. Waters said that at City College is seeing far less recruiters now than they it did in previous years, a fact that reflects the power of students to decide their own futures.
“We’re showing that anyone can stand up and be educators for their piers.”
