Counter-military Recruitment: Finishing Off the War Machine at the Starting Line

OC-RAP, a Southern California group that works to counterbalance military recruiting propaganda, was recently blocked by a school principal from finishing a 1-hour presentation about the realities of military enlistment and career alternatives. She was visibly pissed off that she wasn't notified about the assembly, which featured special guest speakers consisting of one veteran and one military parent. Counter-military recruitment is a movement that apparently irks principals because it's counter-establishment. But others see it as a sustainable and effective strategy to end the Iraq War and other stupid wars.

Wendy Barranco of Iraq Veterans Against the War didn't get to speak about her experience as an Army medic in Iraq at all. She barely identified herself before the principal superseded the mic to harangue the students about how "both sides" need to be presented.

Many doing counter-military recruitment - aka C-R, truth-in-recruiting, informed enlistment - across the country (and around the world like in Britain and Japan) have come up against this proverbial wall. Pro-militarism types somehow must always be there, in the flesh, in real time, if C-R activists want to say their piece. But in my experience it's never the other way around. As a counter-recruiter, I've never been called on to give the "other side of the story," to even-steven with a military recruiter visiting a campus, to cry foul when I hear him promise an unwitting student something like "No, you won't go to Iraq. I'll get you a non-combat job."

Lucky for us, there's this 1986 court ruling: Card v. Grossmont requires public schools to give counter-recruiters the same access to students as granted to military recruiters. CAMS, also based in Southern California, is moving on this. The LA Times recently published an article about CAMS's proposal to get equal access to multiple campuses, where for instance they would show students how to opt out of having their personal info released to the military. So besides resisting war, C-R aims to address the student privacy issue caused by Section 9528 of the misnomered No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which dictates to public high schools to divulge pupil names, addresses and phone numbers, lest the schools lose federal funding. Talk about "books not bombs"...

(Graphic artist unknown; quote from Bertolt Brecht's poem "General, Your Tank Is a Powerful Vehicle," circa 1938)

Technorati Tags: Activism, Antiwar, Counter-military recruitment, Counter-recruitment, IVAW, Peace, Section 9528, U.S. militarism