From: valston-AT-email.arizona.edu Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 13:54:07 -0600 Subject: RE: Events ---------- Forwarded message ---------- 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." -- 180/Movement for Democracy and Education Clearinghouse 31 University Square Madison, WI 53715 Phone: (608) 256-7081 Fax: (608) 265-1131 clearinghouse-AT-tao.ca www.corporations.org/democracy --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005