Grandmothers for Peace Get Busted!

(Subtitled “Post-arrest thoughts from a 57 year old ‘grandmother for peace.’“)

By Susan (that’s her in the picture)

[Note: On Monday March 17, ten Atlanta Grandmothers For Peace were arrested for trying to enlist. Susan was one of them. Below she tells her story.]

I went into this act of civil disobedience primarily to bring the Iraq war back into the corporate media spotlight-and we have been somewhat effective in reminding people that there is a war still going on in Iraq, people are still dying and coming home damaged. And although i knew there was another war here at home that was never in the news, it was never made so clear to me as it was in the fulton county jail on Monday-what one of the guards said was a “light” day. All of the grandmothers talked to the other women sharing the “blue benches” with us. We were an anomaly here, being mostly white and decades older than most. People were curious about us, guards and prisoners. So when we were asked why we were here and responded that we were arrested trying to enlist in the army so younger people would not have to go, the conversation inevitably changed to the sharing of stories of their relatives who had gone to iraq and come home damaged… physically and mentally, or not come home at all. And then the thank-yous for doing what we did - from the employees and the inmates alike.

There was a common thread to their predicaments: A few minor things considered “wrong”, but it is easy to get caught in the web once you step over “the line.” Just miss a court date (too bad if your kids get sick or your baby sitter falls through), or be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And many of these young women have no choice BUT to live in “the wrong place” - there is no decent affordable housing here anymore. These are not bad people, not the criminals you would think they are by the depiction on the evening news-they are just people trying to survive in the hostile environment they have been handed to live in - an economy devastated by greed with no affordable housing or childcare, and jobs paying so little that no one can survive on just one anymore. There is a war going on right under our noses-and it was clear to me that we should bring it into the light and try to do something about it. It was easy for us-we knew we would walk away in a few hours and go back to our somewhat comfortable circumstances. But not for the ones still in the system. One of the guards (who had been to Iraq) asked us to please try to do something about this broken prison system. He knew that we saw it was totally flawed, and he thought we might have some connections to others who could help. Just by being there 10 hours we learned so much - a lot of it from the other women waiting with us. Their knowledge of the “justice” system was amazing-they could really be of service to others trying to navigate the system. We have a lot more work to do here, and we won’t forget the people we met at the Fulton County Jail that day (and night).

Our prison system is a profit making industry which benefits the wealthy few, at the expense of many. This is very very wrong. We have lost our way.

- Additional pictures from the protest can be found here.

- More media coverage here. (Zoom in to read it.)

(Here's the video. Thanks, Artemis.)

God bless these grandmothers. They act in the great tradition of non-violent civil disobedience.

"Semper fi"?

Not hardly. Not if the wounds you suffer are to your heart and to your soul:

Denial in the Corps by Kathy Dobie, from The Nation

Marine Lance Cpl. James Jenkins is buried in the same New Jersey cemetery that he used to run through on his way to high school, stopping at the Eat Good Bakery to get two glazed doughnuts and an orange juice before heading off to class. When his mother, Cynthia Fleming, visits his grave, she looks over the low cemetery wall at not only the bakery but the used-car lot where James used to sell Christmas trees during the winter and the nursing home where he worked every summer and says, “Lord, son, you’re on your own turf.” James, who died at 23, is buried in Greenwood Cemetery; the owners told Cynthia they’re proud to have him there.

During his short career as a Marine, Corporal Jenkins received many commendations recognizing his “intense desire to excel,” “unbridled enthusiasm” and “unswerving devotion to duty.” It was for heroic actions performed during a fifty-five-hour battle with the Mahdi militia in Najaf that Jenkins was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. The fighting, which began on the city streets in August 2004 and moved into the Wadi al Salam Cemetery, was ferociously personal. Marines and militiamen were often only yards apart, killing one another at close range. When the battle was over, eight Americans and hundreds of militiamen were dead.

After that tour, his second in Iraq, Jenkins could barely sleep. When he did, the nightmares were horrible. He was plagued by remorse and depression, unable to be intimate with his fiancée, run ragged by an adrenaline surge he couldn’t turn off.

Back at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton the following January, Jenkins took to gambling, or gambling took to him; he became addicted to blackjack and pai gow, a fast-moving card game where you can lose your shirt in a minute. The knife-edge excitement felt comfortingly familiar. Jenkins went into debt, borrowing thousands of dollars from payday loan companies. Busted for writing bad checks, he was locked up in the Camp Pendleton brig that spring pending court-martial. In the months that followed, he was released, locked up and released again. He spoke often of suicide. The Marines never diagnosed his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When his mother called his command seeking help, Jenkins’s first sergeant, who had not served in Iraq, told Fleming he thought James was using his suicidal feelings to his advantage. “I have 130 Marines to worry about other than your son,” she recalls the sergeant saying. When his command decided to lock him up a third time, James Jenkins ran.

On September 28, 2005, eight months after returning from Iraq, Jenkins found himself cornered in the Oceanside apartment he shared with his fiancée. A deputy sheriff pounded on the front door, while a US Marshal covered the back. The young man with the “intense desire to excel” decided he could not go back to the brig or get an other-than-honorable discharge. He would not shame his family or have his hard-won achievements and his pride stripped away. And he was in pain. “He said, ‘I can’t even shut my eyes,’” his mother says, recalling one of his calls home that month. “He said, ‘I killed 213 people, Mom.’ He said, ‘I can’t live like this.’ He said, ‘Everything I worked for is down the drain,’ and he was crying like a baby.” While the officers waited for his fiancée to open the door, Jenkins shot himself in the right temple…

The rest here. Prepare to be angry if you read it. Really. Angry. The outrage I felt after reading this piece made my heart race. What had been a good day was spoiled. The excitement I had felt on Tuesday over the primaries evaporated into a seething rage. I felt sick. Physically sick. It got my acid reflux all in a mess.

As I mentioned a while back, I have a former student who is a Marine, who is due to ship out to Iraq this month. And we just found out that another former student has just signed up. With the Marines.

When soldiers returned from the Civil War with what we know call post-traumatic stress disorder, their condition was referred to as “melancholy.” After the First World War, the doctors called it “shell shock,” and they knew it was caused by the horrors of war in the trenches. Some of those soldiers actually received some forms of treatment. World War Two? “Battle fatigue.” Many of that generation just dealt with their nightmares and flashbacks on their own, through sleepless nights, ruined marriages, alcoholism. It was only after Vietnam, with advances in psychiatry and psychology and an enlightened culture that physicians finally realized that what happens to those who serve in combat is a disorder, a mental illness, something that needs to be diagnosed and treated. Those who suffer from this condition are ill: they are sick. They are patients, not “slackers” or “malingerers” or “losers.”

It is shameful - if not criminal - that the Marine Corps, which so prides itself on espirit de corps and teamwork, which sells itself to young people as being the best of the best, the “few and the proud,” can treat its own members in such a disgracefully shabby fashion. They have turned back the clock over one hundred years. Even those who tried to nurse Johnny Reb and Billy Yank back to health were more compassionate and empathetic than the callous, cold, heartless excuses for human beings who so wrongly dealt with the young men in this article.

Rather than wasting time looking into which teams might have "illegally" videotaped the practice sessions of what other teams in the National Football League, or which over-paid, over-exposed baseball players might have used “performance-enhancing” drugs, the United States Senate ought to be investigating how America’s elite fighting force mistreats and abuses its own troops. How it ignores them at best, misdiagnoses them and cuts them off from benefits as a matter of routine policy, and, at worst, leaves them adrift, abandoning them to lives of isolation, addiction, and madness, to die at their own hands, all the while denying any complicity or responsibility for their fate. And then disrespecting their families when they have the temerity to try to get to the truth.

Read this article. But don't just be angry about it. Print out a copy. Photocopy that copy. Share this. Leave it around, in doctors' offices, on the seat on the bus, in the pew at your house of worship. And be sure to show it to any young person you might know who might be considering enlisting in the military.

Show them the truth. “Always faithful”? Not to those who serve.

They just get thrown out with the trash.

The First Victims of War

...Are the Soldiers

This is my contribution to the Truth in Recruiting 'blog burst' called for by Anok @ Identity Check. Here's his theme:

Did you know that our government has forced high schools to open its doors to military recruiters? If a school refuses to allow them to recruit on campus, the government will pull their federal funding. Thats right, they're being blackmailed into allowing an open season on minors. Recruiters are meeting with, counseling and setting up recruitment with students as young as 15 years old, maybe younger.

Really. If you've ever seen Gwynne Dyer's excellent, nay definitive seven-part documentary WAR, you were probably struck by the episode entitled Anybody's Son Will Do. That explored the dehumanizing experience of a Marine inductee, or 'boot' at Paris Island. Boot - what does that name alone tell you? It's brutal, but not nearly so brutal as a battlefield - especially when that 'battlefield' in many cases is littered with more dead civilians than legitimate enemy combatants. Not a place for children, in or out of uniform. Dyer's exposé on the methods of turning a normal caring feeling person into a killing machine is burned into my consciousness. And it wasn't pretty.

(By the way, in passing I'd like to say DAMN YOU NFB! Canada's National Film Board owns the copyright to Dyer's documentary series, which has never been made available on DVD for purchase, let alone freely streamed on the web. This is after my tax dollars helped produce the series. Did I say DAMN YOU NFB? Oh, yeah I did. Well, I really meant it.)

I can't do nearly as good a job on this topic as Anok has already done, nor as good as Reconstitution's Jolly Roger has already done, and certainly not as good as Quaker Dave has already done right here at Les Enragés.org, but I can make you aware of those posts and urge you to read them. And I can echo QDave's sentiment, "Keep Your Bloody Hands Off Our Children." QDave's post has a list of things you can do to combat the ghouls who hang around the schools. Most important:

1. Write a letter to your local newspaper, explaining what most parents don’t know: that parents are allowing the privacy of their families to be violated if they allow their child’s school to share this information. Inform them they can opt out. It’s easy. Forms for that purpose can be downloaded here.

Another small contribution I can make is to present this wonderful video, an old clip of the late, great Phil Ochs, in my opinion the greatest protest singer of all time.

I Ain't Marchin' Anymore - Phil Ochs

One other thing I can do is link to this article from Alternet (h/t Jump to the Left) about how the military is trying to make themselve look hip to attract more recruits.

Teenagers, be warned: Military recruiters have armed themselves with "Wat up, dude?" and "nmu" in their effort to lure you to Iraq. (For those who lack daily interaction with teens, "nmu" means "Not much. You?")

As headlines reveal that the military is lowering standards to meet its recruiting goals, the Pentagon is trying new techniques to connect with Millennials -- those born between 1980 and 2000, formerly known as Generation Y.

In September, the website Entropic Memes reported that attendees at last spring's Annual Navy Workforce Research and Analysis Conference were given a slideshow presentation titled "The Road to a 2025 Total Force: Talkin 'bout Their Generation."

At the presentation, ad executive Arthur Mitchell, director of strategic planning for Campbell-Ewald, the agency behind the Navy's Accelerate Your Life campaign, talked about the inability of Navy recruiters to connect with today's young people.

And one more thing - as a bonus. While my mind was on Phil Ochs anyway, here's another one of his tunes, my favorite. It wasn't available by him on YouTube, but this cover was. And being a monster songwriter in his own right, Gordon Lightfoot does NOT do many covers. That should tell you something. Enjoy.

Gordon Lightfoot: Changes

TAGS: Truth in Recruiting, NCLB, Phil Ochs, War Mongering

Go ahead: defend THIS.

I Dare You.

Just sitting here waiting for one of the more prominent warmongers to defend this latest lie. Submitted without further comment. From today's USA Today:

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon's official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

The number of brain-injury cases were tabulated from records kept by the VA and four military bases that house units that have served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One base released its count of brain injuries at a medical conference. The others provided their records at the request of USA TODAY, in some cases only after a Freedom of Information Act filing was submitted.

The data came from:

• Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where troops evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan for injury, illness or wounds are brought before going home. Since May 2006, more than 2,300 soldiers screened positive for brain injury, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw says.

• Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 4th Infantry Division, which returned from a second Iraq combat tour late last year. At least 2,700 soldiers suffered a combat brain injury, Lt. Col. Steve Stover says.

• Fort Carson, Colo., where more than 2,100 soldiers screened were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to remarks by Army Col. Heidi Terrio before a brain injury association seminar.

• Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where 1,737 Marines were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to Navy Cmdr. Martin Holland, a neurosurgeon with the Naval Medical Center San Diego.

• VA hospitals, where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been screened for combat brain injuries since April. The VA found about 20% of 61,285 surveyed — or 11,804 veterans — with signs of brain injury, spokeswoman Alison Aikele says. VA doctors say more evaluation is necessary before a true diagnosis of brain injury can be confirmed in all these cases, Aikele says.

Soldiers and Marines whose wounds were discovered after they left Iraq are not added to the official casualty list, says Army Col. Robert Labutta, a neurologist and brain injury consultant for the Pentagon.

"We are working to do a better job of reflecting accurate data in the official casualty table," Labutta says.

Most of the new cases involve mild or moderate brain injuries, commonly from exposure to blasts.

More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force.

"I am wary that the number of brain-injured troops far exceeds the total number reported injured," he says.

About 1.5 million troops have served in Iraq, where traumatic brain injury can occur despite heavy body armor worn by troops.

Good grief. It just goes on and on. As will the pain and suffering of all these vets.

Keep their bloody hands off our children.

Fight Back Against Giving Kids’ Names to the Military.
by David Giffey (originally posted at Common Dreams)
The No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization this month. There has been much necessary criticism and commentary about its unfunded mandates, forced standardized testing, and takeover threats to struggling public school systems. But another critical piece of the law is often overlooked.

Section 9528, in about 200 words, requires public high schools to give student information to military recruiters upon request unless the families or students opt out...

Section 9528 has consistently escaped attention while the other very real and controversial contents of the law preoccupy educators and legislators, distracting them from what is happening daily as uniformed military recruiters patrol the hallways of the 22,000 public high schools in the U.S.

The presence of military recruiters in schools is a tradition that demands more scrutiny of the increased pressure the war in Iraq places on recruiters to meet their quotas, for which they are paid.

Since the law threw open our school doors to new military recruitment opportunities, the responses among the 425 public school districts in Wisconsin have been utterly inconsistent. It is likely that some administrators, guidance counselors, and certainly many teachers in Wisconsin secondary schools never even heard of Section 9528. As a result, the responses have been disorganized, inconsistent, and in some cases totally absent.

There have been cases in which school districts immediately relinquished student information after receiving intimidating letters from a branch of the military, and then backpedaled after angry parents complained.

Some districts have attempted to limit the number of military recruitment visits per year, some have allowed other groups to present optional information to students, some have prepared concise opt-out forms, and some have done nothing.

The growing unpopularity of the war has resulted in reduced standards and greater recruitment pressure on students in rural Wisconsin school districts, where graduation rates are high and kids don’t have jobs. As a matter of fact, Wisconsin ranked fourth in the nation in 2006 for producing “high-quality” active duty Army recruits, meaning they graduated from high school and scored in the upper half on the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

There are many reasons to question reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, not least being the imbalance between federal funding of the military in 2008 at $1,228 billion compared to federal education funding at $59 billion. Legitimate concerns are raised over the future of public education in the face of the law’s impulse to take over school districts deemed to be unsuccessful.

Section 9528, on its own, is intimidating to school districts. The extreme punishment that could befall a school district for noncompliance with military recruitment mandates is described by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in Bulletin No. 02.12 dated Dec. 10, 2002, which outlines “enforcement” of Section 9528.

“In addition to the potential loss of funds for failure to comply with (Section) 9528 (a school) that denies a military recruiter access to the requested information on students will be subject to specific interventions.” First the noncompliant school would be paid a visit by a senior military officer. Then “the Department of Defense must notify the state governor within 60 days.” Unresolved problems would then be reported to Congress.

What next? Waterboarding the high school principal?

Never mind that recruiters repeatedly violate the privacy rights of minor-age students. Never mind that they mislead, obscure and essentially bribe vulnerable teenagers into military service, which is, in truth, based on waging war, learning how to kill, or to accept being killed. It’s not a “career choice” the recruiters are selling. It’s a lifestyle.

The picture painted by recruiters is one of signing bonuses, veterans’ benefits and college tuition.It would be good for the DPI to step forward with an educational campaign and some statewide standards in order to provide students and their families a fair chance in the face of the $4 billion spent by the military on recruiting each year.It would be even better if our elected officials removed Section 9528 from the law. Until then, all we citizens can do is work to learn about and reveal the truth about military recruitment taking place today in our public high schools.

- David Giffey of Arena is a Vietnam War veteran and a board member of Veterans for Peace in Central Wisconsin.

This is an issue I have posted about before, and I will continue to rant about it until the federal law mentioned above is CHANGED.

In our town, parents got the high school to send opt-out forms to all parents as part of that mountain of paperwork that goes home with students on the first day of school every year. We sent one in with the Liberal-In-Training last month. It’s a start. The point is, this information should be kept private. Away from everybody. The local military recruiter should be no entitled to this data than the manager of the local Burger King would be. If a kid wants to enlist, the recruiters have very nice offices provided at the taxpayers’ expense at many local strip malls. The phone number and address can be found in the Yellow Pages. Recruits should have to opt IN.

So how do we change this? Well, you can agitate a bit. Join me. Do these things, soon:

1. Write a letter to your local newspaper, explaining what most parents don’t know: that parents are allowing the privacy of their families to be violated if they allow their child’s school to share this information. Inform them they can opt out. It’s easy. Forms for that purpose can be downloaded here.


2. Share this information with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and those attending your house of worship.


3. Write letters or send emails to your members of Congress. Tell them that you do not want NCLB to be reauthorized. At all.


4. Barring that, if you don’t want the whole enchilada thrown out (you should, but that’s another post or three), at least this provision should be eliminated.


5. Post about it on your blog. Or link to this post.


6. GET THE WORD OUT

But do something. This week. It might be a small one, but this is one little spanner you can throw into the cogs of the war machine.

TAGS: NCLB, Education, Militarism

What I'm Doing On My Summer Vacation.

So, I spent last week in a rented house down at the Jersey shore, one of my favorite places in the whole wide world, with my wife and younger son, a fifteen year old to whom I refer as The Liberal-In-Training, mainly because he's already quite the well-informed, compassionate progressive. We had an almost perfect week, relaxation-wise and weather-wise (which is good, because few things can be worse than a rainy summer day at the shore, stuck in a house with a bored teenager), and the waves were (for a change) big enough for some serious boogie boarding almost every day. I did pass on the para-sailing, however. I don't do heights.

Anyway, we came back this past weekend, and I got down to work, getting some things done before I have to get back to my middle school classroom in three weeks. One of the first things on my August "to do" list was to write a letter to my son's soon-to-be guidance counselor at the high school which he will be attending this fall, letting him know that we are "opting out" of the No Child Left Behind-mandated program which forces high schools that receive federal money (which means all public high schools, basically) to provide personal and normally confidential information about soon-to-be recruitable students to the military. You didn't know about this? You should, especially if you have kids. The Pentagon has access to all your child's personal stuff, and unless you tell the school you don't want them to have it, the school must provide it. (Read more about it here.) Most parents don't know about this, and many don't care. But, see, we here in The Garden State do care. I'm a devout Quaker, and even though neither of my sons are Friends, the whole family agrees on this issue: the military, in our opinion, has no business using the schools as a rent-free recruiting office. Students, who are a captive audience under our system of compulsory education, should not have to put up with military recruiters in their classrooms, in their cafeterias, at their school activities and athletic events. If a kid wants information about enlisting, she or he can freely visit one of the (several) local recruiting centers in our town. They're easy to find. But my family's unlisted phone number, and my son's Social Security number, amongst other things, should not be available for the asking to some stranger who just happens to wear a uniform. Nuh-uh. Nope.

So I wrote the letter, and I downloaded and filled out a form for my son's school files, and stuffed it all in an envelope, and stuck on the stamp. And then I settled in to catch up on some of the news I had missed (I - happily - had no Internet access at the shore, and had avoided watching the news, at least until the end of the week when I first heard about those trapped miners in Utah), and one of the first things I came across online was this piece:

ANNVILLE, Pa. (AP) - Brittany Vojta survived boot camp. It was high school she couldn't make it through. Now, however, she has benefited from a program the National Guard started this year in Pennsylvania for privates who drop out of high school after signing up.

In an old barracks at Fort Indiantown Gap, the 18-year-old Cleveland woman and other dropouts spent three intensive weeks in class this summer to help them pass their GEDs — so they would meet the minimal educational requirement for staying in the Guard.

Straining to fill its ranks with the Iraq war in its fifth year, the military is taking on an ever bigger role providing basic education to new recruits. The strategy is potentially risky for the military as it strives to maintain the quality of its force, but it's giving dropouts like Vojta a second chance.

"Something happened in that soldier's life that was bad. ... We have the ability to stop another bad action from happening — them getting discharged from the military," said Sgt. 1st Class John Walton, 32, who started the Pennsylvania program. He says it is not about filling quotas but helping the troops.

The rest is here. Now, I have no problem with folks who go the GED route. I used to teach high school, and I know that kids don't always finish on time with a diploma for all sorts of reasons. And getting a GED shows that, in spite of difficulties and obstacles, many young kids still value an education and will do what they have to do to get their diplomas. But. There's something kind of insidious and also telling about this. It's like those so-called "prep schools" that get athletes ready to be exploited by top-shelf NCAA football and basketball powerhouses, making sure they have the minimum "grades" and test scores to be eligible, in spite of the fact that they (the universities) know the athletes will never (or rarely) graduate. I know something about this: I tutored some of these guys at Temple University back in the day, and I also worked with athletes at the community college where I worked before taking my current job.

The military claims it's mostly meeting its monthly quotas (at least the Army says so: yeah, I trust them), and people in the Bush administration and at the Pentagon are running away from our new "war czar's" comments last week about bringing back the draft, but stories like this make me wonder about just how well things are going on the recruiting front. Maybe our young people and their families are finally starting to wise up about what really goes on when it comes to military recruiters and their lies. And maybe that comes from watching the news.

Hopefully, at least, they'll be staying away from my kid. But I'm not counting on it.

PS: This is my first post as a member of The Unruly Mob. I am truly honored to have been invited to contribute to this blog, and I hope my work proves worthy of y'all's faith in me.