Nationally – Youth and Students all over the country step up their resistance against the unfounded war on Iraq—“this time we won’t stop until they listen!”
Beginning today as part of the United for Peace & Justice week of anti-war resistance, the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) joins with their allies to amplify the youth and student-led cultural resistance against three year s of needless war.
”This is the season for change,” says Waverly de Bruijn, member of the Student Environmental Action Coalition, “when students and youth from all over the United States struggle and fight, sing, rap and speak out—in our communities and to our governmental representatives, making a pronounced political statement against the war.”
The war’s impact on youth is increasingly alarming: the vast majority of US troops killed in Iraq have been youth of college-age (18-25). At home, students struggle to bear the economic weight of the war as federal college aid is being re-appropriated to the pentagon budget. Outraged by the war’s costs to our communities, and the war machine’s endless grip on our economy, youth are organizing opposition to war and militarism by amplifying the call for Books Not Bombs!
As the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, young people all over the country are organizing events, concerts, plays, poetry slams and readings, and art nights in their schools, parks, coffee shops and nightclubs in order to come together—from different races, genders, ethnicities and abilities—to create a livable future by ending this war. Their voices then carry as far as the nation’s capital as youth delegations deliver their demands for peace, education and healthcare to their governmental representatives.
”I am organizing against the war because I believe it is unjust and immoral,” said Joshua Eaton, President of the University of West Georgia Student Peace Action Network, host of an NYSPC day of resistance event. “The faith traditions that I come out of, like those of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, have a history of nonviolent action. As students we work to catalyze a nonviolent movement that will be more life-affirming than this culture of war, racism and poverty.”
”NYSPC’s call to start these local events on March 16th is one of the most exciting movement building exercises in recent history,” said Saif Rahman, Movements Coordinator for the Institute for Policy Studies. “We need to start laying the ground for a true cultural revolution, and the first step to do this is by ending this war.”
The National Day of Resistance is organized by the youth-member and youth-led National Youth and Student Peace Coalition—sponsors of the historic Books Not Bombs national student strike of March 5th, 2003 and March 4th, 2004, and the “Not Your Soldier” day of action in November 2005. For more information, go to www.nyspc.net or email info@nyspc.net.
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