EFL
Recruiters pitching military service to high school students tout job training, college scholarships, foreign travel and lifelong friendships. A Palm Beach County peace group offers a different view: Enlisting in the armed forces isn’t like signing with a job placement agency. War can kill you.
Thanks for the tip, Ace.
That’s why peace activists say students who hear from recruiters in school should also expect to hear from them. "We want to be there to balance that perspective," said Javier del Sol, an activist and professional storyteller with a gray ponytail and a bandana knotted around his head.
| Translation: he's unemployed! |
"The military has money and personnel and experience and morals and decency and honor and duty. But a few people can make a difference."
| That's why we joined the Army, isn't it? To make a difference? In a world crawling with snuffies and cut-throats and blood-thirsty boomers, the Army's really the place to be, isn't it? I didn't think a gray-pony-tailed professional story-teller would be able to understand that, but... Oh. He wasn't talking about that, was he? |
For now, the ideological battle will play out first in Lake Worth High School, which claims one of the largest JROTC programs in the world, in a town that is a center for counterculture activism. Through a pilot program this fall, students at Lake Worth High could see peace recruiters in the cafeteria, career fairs, assemblies, classrooms and JROTC classes
(In many schools they are called the faculty.)
-- all the places on campus they now see uniformed military representatives. In time, Palm Beach Area Draft Counseling, a Quaker-sponsored anti-war group, says it will seek equal access to all Palm Beach County schools. And they’d like their campaign to spread to Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Del Sol and Marie Zwicker, who joined the anti-war fight in the 1960s at their local hippie commune, say they’re recruiters for peace.
| "Whut if they gave a war and nobody came? Huh huh! I mean, it ain't like they attacked us or somethin', is it?" |
They’ll counter claims made by recruiters and distribute information on alternatives to the armed services, such as the Peace Corps and college degrees in diplomacy. And they say they’ll tell students of their right to not have personal information shared with representatives of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The pilot peace program appears to be on firm legal footing because of a little-known 1982 U.S. district court ruling granting the leftist front peace group, of which Zwicker was a member, the same access to students and the right to hand out literature. In the decades that followed, peace groups around the nation have won similar cases. But principals continue to resist giving military detractors access to students, said Oskar Castro of the National Youth and Militarism Program, a Quaker group, in Philadelphia. If the Lake Worth High School program moves forward, it could be one of the few programs of its kind, Castro said.
School district officials in Broward and Miami-Dade say they are not aware of any similar anti-military activism in their schools. Lake Worth principal Ana Meehan said details must be sorted out, but she’s open to the idea of letting Palm Beach Area Draft Counseling onto the campus. "We’re looking for a balanced approach," Meehan said. "From what I’ve seen, veterans and parents are open to all points of view, particularly veterans because they understand what democracy is and the hippie freaks do not. We want students to hear a variety of options." Geoff McKee, principal at Boca Raton High School, said he would prefer that the group focus on alternatives to enlistment and not speak negatively about the military. Many students in his school with relatives who are veterans might be offended, he said. "I can see how their message could be construed as anti-patriotic, and they would have to be sensitive of that in their presentation and have to put energy into not creating a disruption in order to be welcome on campus," McKee said.
| I can see how their message can be construed as unpatriotic, too. That's because it's unpatriotic. See this here thing? It's called a shovel. It's also called a spade. |
Erin Killian, 18, who graduated this year from the school’s JROTC program, said the peace group’s campaign is unnecessary. "The military protects the country and the people in it. We should honor them and not right away say how horrible they are," Killian said. "People should know [war] is dangerous just by knowing about history and growing up in this country."
| Provided that your teachers actually teach history, of course. |
Sgt. David Holley, an Army recruiter assigned to Lake Worth High School, said del Sol and Zwicker have a right to speak their mind.
But he’s skeptical of their viewpoint because recruiters can’t force anyone to join an all-volunteer military, he said. "Nobody is going to stop them," Holley said of the peace activists. "But it’s really hard for them to know what really goes on in the military unless they have experienced it for themselves."
| "Not that we'd take that pair of 4-F's into the Army, mind you." |
The battle of ideas at Lake Worth High School may have something to do with Lake Worth itself. The armed forces recruit heavily in this working-class city with a growing number of solid, sensible working-class citizens immigrants from Guatemala, Haiti and Mexico. The high school’s Air Force JROTC, with 475 cadets, claims to be the second largest in the world. But Lake Worth also is the region’s counterculture capital, having spawned many recent anti-war, anti-globalization protests. |