<p>Eadad’s, your post is most touching. I bet it was a life-changing experience for you.</p>
<p>I was a senior and on the yearbook staff at a HS about six miles from Berkeley. The National Guard Armory that sent troops and tanks to deal with demonstrators around the Cal campus was located 3 blocks from my home. Student teachers at my HS were Cal undergraduates. It all was so commonplace to me that protests, police brutality, the smell of tear gas, etc. were an everyday occurrence.</p>
<p>What actually surprised me was that my HS gave copies of our yearbook to law enforcement and student data to the local draft board.</p>
<p>I was a senior, visiting my college campus. Other than a handful of leaflets on the dorm coffee table, you would never have known anything had happened. It was a small college (500 students) in a farming area of Southern Illinois. Definitely not politically active. Interestingly enough, I was supposed to be a Daley girl at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and had a conflict and couldn’t be there. Whew!</p>
<p>I have thought often about this thread after I posted my thoughts. Today, while running errands a car passed me with a bumper sticker that read,“My son fought in Iraq so your son can party in college.” I disagree with that bumper sticker on so many levels as it assumes the worst of college students. That they’re all spoiled and selfish. My son grew up in a family with a father that has worked in the defense industry for 25 years and my daughter’s boyfriend will report for medic training this fall. This falls closer to our family that I ever imagined it would. However, no matter how I feel or the person who owns that bumper sticker feels, it illustrates that the debate of a “class war” that existed in Vietnam stills exists today.</p>
<p>I was a jr in HS trying so hard to be optimistic in a world that gave me little cause to feel that way. It was so hard to plan for a future I was sure wasn’t going to happen.</p>
<p>Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. </p>
<p>William Butler Yeats</p>
<p>patuxent—that is one of my favorite poems, very dark but meaningful. I hadn’t read it for awhile…but it certainly does seem to fit…</p>
<p>I was a freshman nursing student at an all female diploma nursing school in Chicago. As word spread around the medical center and nursing school we went from shocked to sad to angry.</p>
<p>Alongfortheride: The real problem with that bumper sticker for me is not that I feel defensive about my child being in college but that I don’t want (nor did I vote) for their sons to be over there. I feel terrible about what’s going on. It’s bringing back very bad memories…</p>
<p>Crash–
Thank you for saying what needs to be said.</p>
<p>Our PTA just voted to take a stand against allowing recruiters in schools ( although that is a straw man- since with NCLB recruiters HAVE to be allowed into schools.)
Personally, I disagree with it, because I feel that that opens the door to deny other groups that I might have more support for, Planned Parenthood, PFLAG, Peace Corps…
I have heard stories of recruiters lying to get kids to sign up and pressuring them to sign before they are 18. I don’t know about these things, I can see a parent allowing a student to preregister before 18 and neither the parent or child seeing any other options after high school. This I feel is disproportinate in the low income population and with Pell grants being cut, I feel is even going to be the case with more students.
However, a friend of my daughters, was a recruiter ( for the Marines which does not have educational stipends)- he did not do it voluntarily, he was assigned the job, a point which they did not allow me to make at the PTA meeting. He did have many other options, coming from a strong academic background,as well as being one of the most thoughtful and intelligent members of his graduating class.
He volunteered to go to Iraq rather than continue to be a recruiter, and he beleives that they are making progress and that since we are over there, that we need to stay.
I haven’t been to Iraq, so I can’t say for myself other than what I read, I don’t think we should have gone there in the first place and that has been my position from before the beginning, but I am also wondering how long we will end up being there. it is a bad situation.</p>
<p>emeraldkity4 - but that’s where the bad memories come in, isn’t it? 35 years ago, as we waved our friends off on the planes to Viet Nam (or Canada or Europe for those no willing to fight an unjust war), we still faced another 4 or 5 years mired in the mess. And now we are witnessing much the same – dwindling troops, few new ecruits, and a horrible political and tactical situtation where we cannot simply withdraw our troops in the near foreseeable future from the Middle East in clear conscience.</p>
<p>Emeraldkity, one theory behind banning the recruiters is that they are violating the schools’ anti-discrimination standards. So it’s not a matter of taking a political stand for or against the war - it’ a matter of setting up consistent rules that all groups on campus must abide by. The NCLB law says that schools must give military recruiters the same access as other groups - but San Francisco bans any group that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. See: <a href=“http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/02/MNGRMBITPF1.DTL[/url]”>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/02/MNGRMBITPF1.DTL</a></p>
<p>Every summer, a recruiter has called for my older son, asking if he is “still doing okay in college”… They’re pretty aggressive in our area, even calling my daughter, asking her post-hs plans… (see Mom protectively circling her cubs…)</p>
<p>Well, that doesn’t happen around here, but if a recruiter did call, I would say, “oh yes, this year he was elected queen at the cross-dressers ball.” or, perhaps, “yes, thank you for asking, he has been doing much better now that we’ve increased the dosages of all his psychiatric meds”. I doubt they would call back after that…</p>
<p>There are 1 billion Muslims in the world and a significant, I hope, minority of them want to stone to death young girls for adultery, stone to death homosexuals, impose a theocratic state on their co-religionists and spread that state to encompass the whole world. In fact they divide the entire world into the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-harb - the House of Peace and the House of War. The Dar al-harb is any nation without a Muslim government and there is in principle, a canonically obligatory perpetual state of war with the Dar al-harb.</p>
<p>Anybody who values liberal democracy, freedom of conscience, speech, religion, association, and a secular state should be happy that there are men and women who will shoulder the burden to protect what we have here in the Dar al-harb. While I don’t want to see anyone child killed or maimed for any reason I also know that not wanting it to happen isn’t enough to keep it from happening so long as there people in the world willing to turn themselves into bombs or fly airplanes into office buildings.</p>
<p>Calmom - Heh, heh! I’m usually not that quick-witted, as they call during the dinner hour typically. Following the latest news about recruitment issues, I seriously don’t think they care if my son was totally strung out. They’ll throw about anyone into uniform, to make their numbers.</p>
<p>Let’s go back to where we were 35 years ago…</p>
<p>I was a HS junior on 5/2/1970
My HS was near George Air Force Base and 2 of my closest friends had fathers who were MIA (and neither returned) and another had lost her Dad a Sea Bee 6 months previously- about 1/3 of the kids in my class of 180 were the kids of Air Force Officers-so the tone at school was somber-confusing-and scary-Living in a town that was a military family town put a different perspective on Vietnam, the draft ----and now my very dear nephew and his wife are facing deployment.—They believe that democracy and freedom, our freedom, are worth taking a stand for (He is a UCLA Grad)</p>
<p>I was in HS and the events of that day profoundly affected me. Now as a parent I wonder what the reactions would be if this occurred on a college campus today.</p>