CODEPINK NYC and the Granny Peace Brigade partnered for peace at The East Harlem Youth Fair, sponsored by Councilwomen Melissa Mark-Viverito, Tuesday August 30th. We engaged the community with information about the cost of war, truth in military recruitment, and non-military options for youth after high school.  Ms Gizmo provided an opportunity for local taxpayers to determine how they would distribute their tax dollars for community needs – providing reflective moments of decision. A review of the government tax allocation pie chart, which show the actual allocation of taxes for 2012, leads to discussions about the dismal distribution of tax $$s to social and community programs and the whopping amount allocation to past and present war costs.  Comments include: Cuts, cuts, cuts to local services, can’t get an affordable apartment in East Harlem, a high school student can’t get a job and needs to work, a young boy wants art in his school.  Youth, parents, neighbors stop at the “Truth or Myth” poster display to consider the issues of military enlistment.  Participating in the interactive Q & A experience, many are not sure about the effects of post traumatic stress disorder, or treatment of girls in the military, or what kind of skill training they might get.  The fact that an enlistee signs a contract for 8 years is a big surprise to most.  “No way. I just want to get a job or some money for college.” The handout, Options for Life After High School, offers non-military alternatives to review as well as financial aid, scholarships and community service.  Lots to consider and so much to learn.

All those who stopped by the table were encouraged to fill in a sign – Make ? Not War. This activity was well received, and signs indicated such choices as: Make – friends, peace, cakes, love, and happiness.  Now wouldn’t that be just wonderful?

Mother Jones reported recently that in 2003 the military began building a database on Americans from age 15 up. The creation of Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies (JAMRS) was protested at its inception by peace advocates like AFSC and privacy groups like the ACLU, but nevertheless went on using your tax dollars to create 34 million names database run by Equifax, the friendly folks who provide data on your credit rating. JAMRS connected records from state motor vehicle departments and bureaus, from Selective Service, and from private data brokers who deal in records of consumer behavior.

The New York Civil Liberties Union brought a law suit against JAMRS in 2007, which resulted in a settlement and the Pentagon agreeing to stop collecting social security numbers and sharing them on anyone younger than age 17. According to Mother Jones author David Goodman, “Students may opt out of having their JAMRS database information sent to recruiters, but only 8,700 have invoked this obscure safeguard.”

I’ve written here in the past about the use of the ASVAB test given in high schools across the nation to collect data on students. Test takers can select Option 8 to opt out of that aspect of the test – but only if they know about it.

Preparing for the SAT might be a good way to get into college instead of into uniform, right? Not on the Army’s website March2Success.com. A stealth site run by the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox that collects data on about 17,000 new users each month, the web site offers “free” test taking advice that affluent kids get by paying Kaplan for it. A spokesperson for the Army described the site as  “a great service to schools that normally would cost them.”

A lack of education preparing you for critical thinking may be a prerequisite for failing to understand that $1.2 million spent on developing the March2Success website translates into budget cuts again this year for public schools across the nation.

What does this have to do with counter-recruiting? Everything. Is the real purpose of public schools in America education, or is it warehousing same-age potential recruits to deliver them as a conveniently assembled audience for recruiting messages?

Take the ASVAB — as 621,000 students did during the ’06-07 school year in 11,900 high schools. The Armed Services Vocation Aptitude Battery is given during school time, in buildings funded by local taxes, supervised by staff paid by citizens who thought they were hiring folks to educate their children, not recruit them.

Recruiters lie to high school students all the time when they claim that the ASVAB is a test to tell you which careers you would be suited for. In fact, the test as used by the Army focuses on these “careers”: Clerical, Combat Operations, Electronics, Field Artillery, General Maintenance, General Technical, Mechanical Maintenance, Operators and Food, Surveillance and Communications, Skilled Technical and Special Forces. And, unless you or your family know about selecting “Option 8″ when you take the ASVAB, it will deliver your contact data and your test scores to a recruiter near you.

Then there’s JROTC, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, one of the best recruitment programs we could have. Educators and school boards around the U.S. have long opposed this militarization of high schools which allocates classroom space and other resources to teaching underage kids how to be recruits, not officers. Despite the acronym claiming it’s a junior version of ROTC, which offers tuition if you agree to enlist at the university level.

Counter-recruiting activists in San Francisco agitated for years and finally succeeded in 2006 in getting a San Francisco School Board vote to phase out JROTC from the district. The military countered by going around the school board and placing an initiative on the ballot last fall supporting JROTC.  The non-binding Proposition V passed by a slim margin, and the San Francisco school board voted 4-3 in May to keep the JROTC program three weeks before it was set to expire, but then laid off all the JROTC instructors. Budget cuts are a double-edged sword, apparently.

The four SF school board members who had voted in 2006 to remove JROTC were no longer on the board by May, 2009. Maybe time for you or a family member to think about running for your local school board?

Locals calculated JROTC cost San Francisco taxpayers nearly $1 million per year. A million that could be spent lowering class sizes from 40+ kindergarteners. But that might be dangerous.

If kids come up through schools which teach them, not what to think, but how to think, they may be a lot harder to recruit.

She raised her morale by springing into action:

“Ten days ago my family went to a Harkin Theater in Moreno Valley, CA. March Air Reserve Base is a big part of the economy of this small town in Riverside County. I was outraged when I saw a video game from goarmy.com in the arcade. Our four person, three generation chapter wrote letters to Harkin’s corporate office. I received a call within hours, but wanted a written answer to why our tax dollars were being used for a recruiting tool in a private establishment. Long story short, the game has been replaced with “Police Trainer.” Personally objectionable? Yes! Better than a recruiting tool for the Army? Absolutely!”

Corla adds: “This is a message for all those tiny PINK chapters who are frustrated with a lack of participants which hinders our ability to make a big splash. Sometimes we become discouraged because we feel we are not making a dent in the BIG picture.” True of many small groups of dedicated folks working to defend young people’s freedom from the recruitment hard sell now permeating U.S. culture.

With school about to start up again in most parts of the country, it’s the season of a million small dents. Who knows whether the student a counter-recruiter talks to or shares some literature with will enlist? Education is an open ended endeavor with few immediate results. One conversation or phone call or letter often has a ripple effect. Who knows — a student may enlist anyway, and then become like “Skippy” and “Robert,” effective resisters from within the military.

At a high school graduation in May ’08, an Army National Guard recruiter delivered a five minute stump speech for the “war on terror” (a phrase he used twice) while at the podium to present awards to two graduates. This was an unprecedented use of that forum to deliver a political message, and the wording of his remarks matched that of the “award” presented to the students. He described in detail how one recruit’s “eyes lit up” when shown a Humvee mounted with an gun.

Protests to the school administrator resulted in a letter to the recruiter’s commanding officer. It warned that school events were not be used as a venue for political speeches, and asked for advance copies of any remarks to be made at graduation events. Recruiters for other branches of the military similarly put on notice. No repeat occurred at graduation ’09.

Media tools can be super useful for communicating to high school students that killing people is not a good career path.

Arlington West is a project that remembers fallen soldiers with an interactive installation on beaches around the nation. The documentary film of the same name was created by Sally Marr and Peter Dudar. In June they took the “Arlington West Film” presentation to Verdugo Hills High School in Tujunga, California where teachers report “recruiters are all over the school, like sharks circling for chum.” Two students struggled for months to get a screening of the film for approximately 200 students. In each of the three showings, discussions revealed at least one student who had lost a family member or friend in Iraq or Afghanistan, and several who had first-hand knowledge of the effects of PTSD on returning vets and their families. “Arlington West” in DVD format and study materials for the classroom are available by request from the Arlington West website.

Dents, dents and more dents in the “war is glamorous” propaganda blitz by recruiters.

But the big picture is a lot more ominous. There still seems to be plenty of money to invite public educators to a thrill ride hosted by the Army in an area with traditionally low enlistment numbers despite a chronically low-income population.

California is among several states effecting draconian cuts to the public education budget. Online discussions exhaust the subject of tax cuts vs. tax increases without acknowledging the 54% for war federal budget elephant dominating the room. Class sizes will soar, faculty positions will be cut or left vacant, and programs will wither away. What is likely to rush in to fill the void?

Military themed schools! Arne Duncan championed these quite successfully in Chicago as superintendent of schools, and now he is Obama’s Secretary of Education. Read an account of his tenure in Chicago and the prospects for public education with Duncan at the helm here. Schools like this make JROTC programs look tame by comparison. More on those next week in NOBODY’S RECRUITS.

Then, an amazing victory for a community in Atlanta that didn’t want the military helping to create a public high school for their children. Activists waged a two-month campaign to oppose the establishment of a military-themed high school which the U.S. Marine Corps and the DeKalb County Board of Education had hoped to open on Aug. 10. Relentless watchdogs of their school board, this team of parents, students and community members used media coverage and direct actions to successfully oppose the plan. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Obama’s new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is known in Chicago for having fostered many such schools during his tenure as superintendent of schools. And plans continue for military-themed high schools in other low-income areas around the country. Who’s watching your school board?

More bad news: the Senate voted 93-1 to “temporarily” increase the Army by 30,000 troops for the next three years. The lone dissenting vote came from Senator Russ Feingold (D – WI). Set up for yet another “emergency” war funding supplemental bill? No way, ’cause Obama promised to stop that sort of thing. Didn’t he?

Finally, for all you counter-recruiting activists out there, here’s the real deal in the words of “Nydas” who commented on Digg about an article from the L.A Times reporting on the family of Pfc. LaVena Johnson, who doubts she committed suicide in Iraq as the Army alleges. This is the c-r target audience, talking about the poverty draft:

“I was stationed at balad. It is, in fact, the nicest place to be stationed inside Iraq. No idea what her experience was like, but with 2 swimming pools, 2 Food courts (Pizza hut, popyes, BK, etc.) and the largest PX in iraq, it wasn’t a bad experience for me. Thankfully i never had to leave the base, as i did administrative work, and the worst of the war i had to witness was seeing Iraqi civilians torn up at the Balad hospital when i would pull guard duty. Maybe she went outside the wire and had bad experiences, or maybe she was depressed with things back home, but Balad is definitely not a bad place to be, and certainly not suicide worthy. Food over there was even better than the crap the Army serves us here. God i miss Mongolian BBQ night, and all the free mountain dew i could drink.”

So it was quite exhilarating two weeks ago for many of us to join counter-recruitment organizers from all over the country at the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth conference in Chicago. Thanks to two scholarships provided by CP-NYC, we were able to bring two NYC high school students with us, Renee Laster and Gissaury Castillo, both part of the amazing girls’ leadership center, the Lower Eastside Girls’ Club. They joined the Ya-Ya team, fit right in, and took off with zeal. Both were anxious to spread the word at home, which they have already done at the LESGC summer camp program.  They can’t wait to get back to school to teach about ‘students not soldiers’ and how students can fill out “opt-out” forms so recruiters cannot get access to all their private information, including their home addresses.  I am so proud that we provided the financial aid – it made a difference, and two young women have picked up on our issues and will continue the fight.

The conference itself met all my expectations – good workshops, networking with experienced C-R activists, new materials, common interests and frustrations, and above all, a passion for changing from militarization of youth in high schools to a community of education for peace. There were 100 students – some new to the issues and many longer term activists. The communion among them was inspiring and their energy to make change dramatic. I was moved by their insights and determination to make a difference.

Barbara Harris, a 72-year-old grandmother, former teacher and lifelong New Yorker, for the past four years has spear-headed major work in New York City to end military recruitment and JROTC programs  in city high schools, known for their predatory targeting of low-income schools, false promises and lies. Read a New York Times article about her work here.