From Draft NOtices, January-March 2006
— Catherine Kennedy
The career fair committee of Kea‘au High School in Hawai‘i was kind enough to allow me to have a table on Friday, Nov. 4, at their high school career fair to discuss with the students alternatives to military enlistment and the realities of war. As far as I know, this is the first time a table like mine has been present at one of these Big Island high school events. I felt it was important to be there to counterbalance the several tables touting careers in the Armed Forces.
I provided interested students with literature on ways to pay for college without the military; lists of ideas for alternative careers that meet kids’ goals for public service, learning a trade or their desire for adventure and travel; and Web sites for researching these choices. I presented pictures of patriotic role models who have worked outside the military to improve living and working conditions of others. I also offered literature that describes the realities of military life and gives kids advice on things to look at in the enlistment contract. I also played a DVD of wounded vets talking about their experiences in Iraq, many of whom are just a few years older than the high school kids themselves.
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
- Arlene Inouye and Jorge Mariscal
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Hispanic Heritage Month Means Covert Recruiting
From Draft NOtices, November-December, 2005
— Arlene Inouye and Jorge Mariscal
On October 7, 2005, at the Anaheim, California, Convention Center not far from Disneyland, the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Corporation hosted an awards luncheon for approximately 500 people including more than 300 middle school, high school and college students. The featured employer at the luncheon was the Department of Defense.
Part of the Pentagon’s ongoing efforts to attract more Latinos into its ranks, the luncheon included Latino ROTC and military service academy students and a display that forms part of the “Medal of Honor Tour,” a joint venture between the Army and the Hispanic public relations agency Cartel Impacto (a unit of The Cartel Group of San Antonio, Texas). According to the official press release, the tour is a “national program to highlight the selfless and courageous legacy of service Hispanic Americans have imprinted in our nation's armed services.”
One day earlier, the “Medal of Honor Tour” had descended upon Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles. Accompanied by a JROTC color guard, the display was presented to students by Rick Leal, President of the Medal of Honor Society. Leal’s remarks were followed by presentations by City Councilman Tony Cardenas and Ramon Rodriguez, a local veteran who served three tours in Vietnam.
Rodriguez’s remarks were the stuff of a recruiter’s fantasy. He stated that although he had almost dropped out of high school, he ended up earning three advanced degrees “all because of the military.” He repeatedly stated that he owed a great deal to the military, highlighted career and education benefits, and urged students to join JROTC. He concluded by saying: "Freedom is not free, it has to be fought for.”
- Glen Motil
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Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize Winner is a Conscientious Objector and Fierce Counter-militarism Advocate
From Draft NOtices, November-December, 2005
—Glen Motil
The Swedish Academy says playwright, poet, and polemicist Harold Pinter “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
An East London boy, son of working-class Jewish immigrants, is sent away to rural England on a traumatic separation where he immerses himself in reading. The reason for his sojourn is to escape bombs falling from the sky; it is the Battle of Britain and the Nazis are terrorizing the civilian population of London. The boy returns to find a devastated urban landscape. This experience would forever impact and alter the consciousness of this boy named Harold Pinter.
When he turned 18 in 1948, as World War II was being mythologized as the so-called “Good War” and the Cold War age of nuclear horror was just beginning, young Harold simply said, “No.” He confirmed his stance as a conscientious objector to British conscription, was brought before a court twice and fined for refusing to perform military service. He cited his cursory but traumatizing knowledge of war as his reason for refusal. According to Peter Marks of the Washington Post, “Pinter told an interviewer in 2002 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, ‘I didn’t actually see anybody killed, but I saw where bombs had fallen and I was part of that world of bombs dropping.’” Because of this, Pinter acknowledges that “out of one’s consciousness and out of one’s recognition of other people’s reality” one begins to see and feel “what death means to other people.” This knowledge made it impossible for him to take part in what he viewed as barbarism. Less than a decade later, Pinter rose to international fame with his plays of absurdist bent — originally misunderstood and critically lambasted but ultimately widely embraced and hailed as genius.
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
