Antiwar Activists Want Table at School Career Day

[Joanne98]

by Christine Legere
At Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School, back-to-school preparations include a debate over whether antiwar activists will be allowed at the school’s annual career day, just as military recruiters are.

The effort is led by a Bridgewater-based group called Citizens for an Informed Community. Spokesman Vernon Domingo, a Bridgewater resident and Bridgewater State College geography professor, said the group simply wants to promote thought-provoking discussion.

“We’re local, we live here and work here, and we support this country,” said Domingo. “We’re patriotic in the sense that we want this country to be as good as it can be.”

Domingo, along with Bridgewater resident and former Massasoit Community College adjunct professor Raymond Ajemian, helped form Citizens for an In formed Community shortly before the invasion of Iraq. Since then, it has enjoyed some local success, for example, prompting Bridgewater Town Meeting to formally protest the federal Patriot Act in 2004, and, more recently, to call on Congress to get out of Iraq.

Citizens for an Informed Community is now looking to make some policy changes in the School Department that would allow the group to deliver its message at Bridgewater-Raynham Regional High School. At least two other towns - Cohasset and Milton - have allowed antiwar representatives to attend career days.

Ajemian said the group has three goals: to secure the right to set up a table at the high school’s career days; and to get school administrators to better inform students of their right to opt out of the armed services vocational aptitude tests given at high schools, and of their right to block the military from getting personal information for recruitment purposes.

The information that military recruiters hand out at career day doesn’t paint a full picture, said Ajemian.

“The brochures say nothing about dying and nothing about post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Ajemian, who is a Vietnam era veteran.

He also said that promises of college tuition payments for those who sign up for duty sometimes don’t pan out.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/17/11038/

[TwilightGardener]

1. Ridiculous. Unless being "anti-war" is a career unto itself.

[MicaelS]

3. Right.....

Be an anti-war activist pays real well. :sarcasm:

[kas125]

4. What is ridiculous is that the military recruiters are

usually given more access to our kids than job or college recruiters. At my kid's school, military recruiters are in the hallway or the cafeteria several times a month, giving out prizes for doing pull ups or push ups and all sorts of other things. They are guys who went to the school, so they know many of the kids already. Job and college recruiters have to meet with the students, by appointment, in the guidance office. One of IVAW's main programs this year is truth in recruiting. Just this afternoon I arranged for our local IVAW chapter to begin going with me to my son's high school this year. We want to be there as often as the recruiters are and I am interested to see what the school thinks of that.

[patrice]

2. Please God, bless their sweet souls!