By Emma Kaplan

Report from We Are Not Your Soldiers organizers

Today Emma Kaplan, World Can’t Wait Youth & Student Coordinator, and Matthis Chiroux, Iraq War resister, took the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour to a public high school in Los Angeles. Emma said it felt like a prison: one entrance, one exit, and lots of cops in uniform. "You feel like you’re viewed as a criminal just stepping through the doors," she said.

Most of the students won’t graduate. They are mainly Latino and Black, a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants.  Emma wore a shirt with “Bush Regime: WANTED for Illegally Crossing Borders," and got a lot of “I like that shirt!! Where did you get that shirt?"  The school has the highest number of foster kids in the county. But the teachers genuinely care about their students and want them to have a better future, even though they’re up against tough odds.

Updated report originally posted at wearenotyoursoldiers.org

Today at a high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA: 100 students heard Emma, Matthis and Robin Long present We Are Not Your Soldiers. 2-3 classes came, brought by their teachers. The school is extremely diverse: white, Latino, Black and Asian. Some of the students are already doing projects about military recruiting. One of the students researched, and found that this high school is the most heavily recruited from school in the Bay Area. Other students were already working on a “counter-propaganda” campaign within the school against military recruitment using posters.

By bmcfann25
Originally posted on ivaw.org

I was at McDonald's the other day when something quite peculiar happened to me. I was standing in line waiting for my food when an older veteran, obvious by his Vietnam Veteran hat, and his wife approached me. He extended his hand and said he would like to shake my hand and thank me for my service.

He said that I and others like me were his hero. He said he was proud of me and all that I had done in service to my country. His wife looked at me and smiled broadly. She said "we are all so proud of you boys," and that "more young men should be just like you." Not wanting to be offensive, I shook the old vets hand and nodded my acknowledgment. The couple smiled and left knowing they had done their patriotic duty by thanking a veteran.

Statement from Josh Stieber 

By Matthis Chiroux

Nearly 43 years ago to the day, Martin Luther King delivered one of his two most famous speeches: Beyond Vietnam. For the first time, King took a hard-line stance in opposition to the Vietnam War, drawing a connection between the struggle for civil rights and the struggle for peace.

While this speech is remembered as one of the most positive and defining moments of his life, at the time King made it, he was widely condemned, not just by the media and the American mainstream, but by his own colleagues in the civil rights movement.

By Alice Embree

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