[Peace-discuss] Fwd:aware agenda?

[jencart]

from a concerned friend (sorry my e-gizmo cut it off, but you get the gist)
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Jenifer,

I think perhaps AWARE could help organize parents to confront recruiters in our schools. The military is having trouble getting kids to sign up and parents across the country are resisting these recruitment tactics allowed by no-child-left-behind.  Making it hard to get kis to join up will force the miltary to ask for a draft and that will may lead to  resitnace simliar to vietnam - given that it is clear that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld liked through their teeth about WMD - ie the reason for us being in Iraq.

Go to the schools and show the kids the results of war in the presence of the recruiters.

Here is a NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/nyregion/03recruit.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

June 3, 2005
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
By DAMIEN CAVE 

Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children.

Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters were promising students jobs as musicians. Mr. Terrazas has been trying since September to hang posters at his son's public school to counter the military's message.

Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.

"We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other P.T.S.A.'s will follow."

Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.

Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end.

Around the dinner table, many parents said, they are discouraging their children from serving.

At schools, they are insisting that recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."

Legally, there is little a parent can do to prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the strong objections of a parent.

The Pentagon - faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian