Victories:
Recruiters on the Run
by Brian Hokanson
University of Minnesota student
In one corner, a handful of high school students, in the other, school administrators, reactionary donors and the U.S. military.
It sounds like an unfair fight, and it is; military recruiters, their allies, and their lies don’t stand a chance when confronted by passionate students and their supporters.
The complete removal of recruiters from high schools will be difficult, as federal law currently requires schools to welcome the military inside. However, in districts across the country recruiters are encountering active, protesting youth and consequently are choosing to go elsewhere.
Locally, last spring, students from Bloomington Kennedy High School scored one of Youth Against War and Racism’s first victories, winning the basic right to table alongside recruiters. Before then, says Kennedy activist Laura Madsen, recruiters “were extremely aggressive, even intimidating, and could break the rules by going up to anyone they wanted without question. [Today] they’re becoming less aggressive, and have only come a few times this whole year.”
YAWR leaders from other schools report similar successes. At South High in Minneapolis and Mound Westonka High, where recruiters had virtually free reign before, protests have forced recruiters to retreat into the career centers. It makes sense; if they know a campus isn’t buying the pitch, they’ll go elsewhere to meet their quotas. Every time a student learns the truth about the military, another victory is won.
read more about victories against military recruiters here
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Crisis in Recruitment Let’s jam the military machine! In the end, it will not be the politicians in Washington, DC, who decide when the troops come home. It will be movements of ordinary people in Iraq and the U.S. forcing them to act. And high school students have a unique power in this equation. A new study confirms what we have been saying all along – if the Pentagon can’t convince more young people to join up, their war machine will come to a grinding halt. The study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, commissioned by the Pentagon itself, found that the Army is “in a race against time” to win the war “or risk ‘breaking’ the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment (Associated Press, 1/24/06). Many soldiers have been forced to redeploy to Iraq again and again, against their will. This factor, alongside the military’s failure to meet recruitment targets to replace the exhausted soldiers now in Iraq, has left the Army a “thin green line” that could soon snap, says the report. The military will not be able to sustain deployments long enough to crush the insurgency, predicts the study, which also concluded that Pentagon plans for lowering troop levels in 2006 were driven by the realization that they were overextended. This shows the huge potential power of the counter-recruitment movement. |
| www.yawr.org |
