Urgent: Youth Need Your Help To Get Recruiters Out

In the wake of protests of 6 years of the Iraq occupation, we are receiving requests from students and teachers to bring the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour to their schools. We can't get to them without your help! $12,000 is needed by April 15th. Donate today to bring Iraq & Afghanistan veterans into high schools across the country.

Thousands of students need to be reached in the next two months, encouraged to not join the army and to forge a student movement to get recruiters out of the schools as part of halting all the wars.

This tour is needed to reach these youth now:

Friday, Barack Obama announced he is sending 4,000 troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 17,000 troops he announced last month. This is not change! This is an escalation of a crime against humanity. What are these troops being sent to do? What are the youth being recruited for? The murder, rape, and torture of innocent men, women, and children; to kick down doors and terrorize families... all so that the U.S. can tighten its stranglehold on the land, resources, and shipping routes of Middle East.

Where will these troops that Obama is sending come from? The military recruiters have budget of billions to recruit youth who are in high school now. They roam the hallways and lunch-rooms, call students at home, and set up at malls where kids hang out. The military cannot fight this expanded "war on terror" in Afghanistan without this fresh cannon fodder. Military recruiters now have almost unlimited access to reach high school students because the "No Child Left Behind" law ties funding for schools to whether recruiters can get to students.

Since November 24 the WANYS Tour has been to x amount of high schools and x colleges reaching x amount of students. The tour has hit the Bay Area, LA, Chicago, New York, . Most of the schools have been predominently Black and Latino and almost all of them have been working class - exactly the students that the recruiters are targeting. When recruiters come into their school, students need to know exactly what they are being recruited for. Not freedom, not democracy, and not better "career options."

Speakers on the tour give students reasons not to go into the military, and help organize collective resistance to recruiters' lies by spreading visible mass resistance to joining this military as a part of stopping this war of terror for empire.

Classroom presentations include a short presentation by a World Can't Wait youth organizer and an Iraq and/or Afghanistan war veteran, a 10-minute video clip of testimony by Iraq veterans from the March 2008 Winter Soldier hearings about what they witnessed and perpetrated and footage of high school students protesting military recruiters along with an open discussion. At the end we conduct a short survey to give us a sense of what young people are thinking.

This takes funding. As a movement of the people we rely entirely on your support. Speakers are ready, students want us to come, and we are ready to organize another even stronger round especially with the latest intolerable surge in Afghanistan, but we can't send the tour out until we have the money….$12,000 are needed by April 15th to cover transportation/lodging costs, provide modest stipends to the speakers, produce organizing kits for students, promote the tour on Facebook and other youth oriented sites and create T-shirts and stickers to spread the word.

Donate generously so that World Can't Wait can continue this tour reaching thousands more students before the end of this school year with the truth of what they are being recruited for!

To learn more about the tour, watch videos, and meet the vets visit wearenotyoursoldiers.org

Sincerely, Debra Sweet, Director, The World Can't Wait

P.S. This tour and the Iraq Vets that are a part of it are extremely precious in a time where so many have given up the fight to stop these wars. Support them - spread the resistance - donate generously today to help us raise the $12,000 we need by April 15th. 

$12,000 for travel & stipends needed by April 15 to schedule the last 2 months of high school classes around the U.S.

From a New York City teacher after the tour:

At the time the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour visited, my students were preparing to take the New York State Regents exam. Many of my students have failed the exam at least two times. As their last shot before making the decision to drop out or get a GED, I was concerned that failing the regents exam would encourage some of my students to join the military instead.

Matthis Chiroux, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Elaine Brower, member of the World Can't Wait, hosts of the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour, presented a compelling excerpt of the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan Eyewitness Accounts" testimonials which summoned the visual and emotional interest of otherwise unresponsive youth. Matthis engaged the students with his own personal recollection of the military. He asked important questions, revealing truths of the racism of the war on Iraq, and connected to the personal lives of the students, while Elaine Brower offered the perspective of a mother, a point of view many of my students are sensitive to having been raised by only their mothers.

After the World Can't Wait presentation, it was apparent that my students were affected. The next day one student showed me a poem he wrote about a young boy from the ghetto enlisting in the military and dying, another asked for a World Can't Wait T-shirt, and yet another, who had wanted to join the military, handed me a recommendation form for a vocational school. Others are still lost forever to the military but the "We Are Not Your Soldiers" tour offered the education American youth really need and that more teachers need to be more conscious of.

Request for the tour from a student:

My school has an immense problem with military recruitment - they are here every day, in the classrooms, in the lunchroom. At least 1/4 of our graduates join the military, as this is a fairly rural community and people don't believe they have many options.

I want to request details of the tour, and how to arrange a visit, what it would cost, etc. The school has agreed to permit it (grudgingly), but it would not be an easy audience.

Any information you could send would be extremely helpful. Thank you. Jenny E.