File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0109, message 302


From: valston-AT-email.arizona.edu
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 13:54:07 -0600
Subject: RE: Events


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Subject: [studentsnowar] USA TODAY: Students rally against war

Sept. 20, 2001

Students rally against war
By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY

Remember the peace movement? It's back on campus. This time it's called
"Peaceful Justice," and students are swimming against the patriotic tide
following last week's terrorist attacks. A wave of anti-war sentiment crests
at noon Thursday on 150 college campuses in 36 states. Organizers expect
as
many as 8,000 people to rally at the University of California-Berkeley and
as
few as several dozen to sign letters to President Bush at Baylor University,
a
Baptist school in Waco, Texas. They are a distinct minority, but these
students want the nation to hear their argument for "justice without war,"
and
their distress at the rapid move to war footing.

"We should work on a peaceful solution as opposed to continuing the global
cycle of violence," says Jessica Gould, 20, a Harvard sophomore from
Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. "We shouldn't answer the deaths of thousands of innocent
people with more deaths of innocent people."

Students at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., originated today's
national action. "We just really wanted to get an alternative way to react
to
the situation, " says Mary Thomas, 19, a sophomore from Lafayette, Calif.

The alternative appears to exclude confronting terrorists, however. In its
mission statement, the group opposes "retaliatory violence" and urges U.S.
policymakers to study the underlying causes of terrorism.

Campuses have been holding teach-ins, memorials and other events since the
attacks Sept. 11. As Bush has tried to prepare the country for a long-term
war against terrorism, many college newspapers have published dissenting
views.

A military attack guarantees that "our search for justice will end in the
slaughter of more innocent civilians," said editors of The Michigan Daily
at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "Punish (Osama bin Laden) in our
federal courts," Chris McCall, a junior at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison, wrote in The Badger Herald.

Nick Woomer, 21, a philosophy major at the University of Michigan, says
he
has received one-third positive, two-thirds negative responses to a column
in
which he called for "a strong, broad-based anti-war movement to bring
everyone back to their senses." He calls Bush's rhetoric "pretty scary."

Academics who study social movements say students are being taught to
question and analyze, and that's what they are doing. Peter Kuznick, an
associate history professor at American University in Washington, D.C.,
says
scores of his 180 students say the country should "step back and think"
before doing anything. He says they are critical of U.S. foreign policy,
curious about why the United States is so hated and convinced that "a
military
response will probably cause more harm than good."

Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at New York University, says students have a
right
to be skeptical, but they also a responsibility to suggest realistic
alternatives. "Bin Laden is not going to walk into a police station to turn
himself in," he says. "Are they really opposed to armed force that
accomplishes that end?"

Gitlin led the leftist Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and
protested the Vietnam War. Now he has hung a flag outside his Greenwich
Village apartment and says the nation has "a right of self-defense," albeit
"restrained and focused," in the face of attack.

Jessica Gould's father, Harris, a New Jersey lawyer, also protested the
Vietnam War. The difference now, he says, is that "we are under a direct
threat" and must "root out" terrorists. "I would not like to see innocent
people be killed, although I understand there would have be to some of
that,"
he says.

The organizers of today's events are not ready to settle for that. "I
personally feel that war is never the solution," says Andy Ross, 25, of
Madison. "It's better to sit down and talk and work these things out, rather
than going into a violent situation which will inevitably harm innocent
people."


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Madison, WI 53715
Phone: (608) 256-7081
Fax: (608) 265-1131
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