WE ARE NOT YOUR SOLDIERS!

To socially conscious students and educators,

Bring the “We Are Not Your Soldiers” Tour to your school!

What?

A nationwide effort, to reach high school students with the truth about military recruiters and the wars that they are recruiting for, and give them the arguments and tools to talk to their peers. 

We are looking for teachers and students to help arrange classroom presentations and school assemblies which would include:

A short presentation by a World Can’t Wait youth organizer and either an Iraq/Afghanistan war veteran or a military family member.

An open discussion.

A 10-minute video clip of testimony by Iraq veterans from the March 2008 Winter Soldier   hearings about what they witnessed and perpetrated.

Footage of high school students protesting military recruiters.

A short survey that students would take to give us all a sense of what they think.

Who?

  

Emma Kaplan: Youth & Student Coordinator,  World Can’t Wait. She has organized demonstrations against the Bush torture policy,  military recruiting centers, and police brutality. She has spoken to youth at concerts, in classrooms and on campus, calling on this generation to take responsibility for the crimes their government is committing in their names.  Most recently she participated in the protests in Olympia Washington where people formed human blockades to prevent stryker vehicles from being sent to Iraq.

Iraq Veteran Matthis Chiroux:  is a veteran, honorably discharged after 5 years in the army.  Subsequently, he received forced reactivation orders while in the IRR, to deploy to Iraq, and has publicly refused those orders.  Thus, he is now a military resister.  Matthis organized the anti-war veterans’ protest at the last presidential debate at Hofstra University and is a student at Brooklyn College.  He is scheduled for a military hearing sometime next year.

Carl Dix:  Carl was one of the ‘Fort Lewis 6′, Black GI’s who refused to go to Vietnam in 1970, and he did time at Fort Leavenworth Military Penitentiary for this “crime.”  A lifelong revolutionary, Carl is a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party. 

Elaine Brower:  National Leader of World Can’t Wait and outspoken activist against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Her son is currently stationed in Iraq on his 2nd tour, and has done an additional tour of duty in Afghanistan.  He is in the USMC reserves out of Garden City, Long Island.

Why?Where are they going to get these troops to fight (and die) for all this?  

The military reportedly has a new recruiting approach: “Obama will get the US out of Iraq.” 

However, many people don’t know that Obama is planning to keep 50-80,000 troops in Iraq, send 10,000 more troops to escalate the war in Afghanistan, and increase the overall size of the US military by 92,000 more soldiers. Obama has been an enthusiastic supporter of the No Child Left Behind Act. When asked in one presidential debate, “Will you vigorously enforce a statute which says colleges must allow military recruiters on campus and provide ROTC programs?” Obama said “yes.” 

It becomes clear that if we want the crimes of our government to stop, we must bring into being a movement of resistance against them. And stopping military recruiters from preying on our youth is a key element of putting a stop to this.

Many people know that recruiters lie.  They lie about the job skills training and education benefits that enlistees will never receive. Recruiters don’t tell  youth about the one third of female GI’s that report being raped while in the service, or the post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide rates of the returning veterans. The U.S. armed services will spend over $5 billion dollars in 2008 for recruiting. According to the ACLU, “The U.S. military’s recruitment policies, practices, and strategies explicitly target students under 17 for recruitment activities on high school campuses.”

But what this tour aims to expose is an even bigger lie. What are youth being recruiting to do? Is the U.S. military of 2008 spreading freedom and democracy? What does it mean to be “patriotic” and “support the troops”? How can you prioritize the lives of people in one country, or the world? Is the military the place to be if you’re looking to “have an experience,” “get some discipline and structure,” “give your life a purpose,”? Or is joining the military harmful to oneself and to people throughout the world? 

These are the questions the tour will explore with high school students. We want to learn from the students and we know we will have many different points of view in the audience. We look forward to stirring up some debate which all too often gets smothered, in the name of being “balanced” and avoiding controversy. 

If you find this situation unacceptable and think that schools should be places of learning and not cheap labor depots for the U.S. military, then help bring this tour to your school! Help bring this tour to your campus and be part of awakening the consciousness and activism of a new generation struggling to figure out what to do with their lives.

Contact World Can’t Wait now to help make this tour happen:

Call 347-385-2195 or email elainebrower@gmail.com 

For more info check out www.worldcantwait.org   

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under tour information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.