Come Kick it with Lt.Watada!

Renton Youth Against War & Racism was established last year on Renton High's campus by a number of hard-working, conscientious students concerned with the predatory tactics of military recruiters and the ongoing War in Iraq. Youth Against War & Racism (YAWR) is a nationwide network of high school and college students determined to fight social injustice including, but not limited to, war and embedded racism. YAWR's main goal is to bring youth into the political activism so that they may fight for change and find empowerment confronting issues affecting friends, classmates, families, communities, and futures.

Why "War AND Racism"???

Alongside supporting general social justice and equal rights for people of all colors, sexes, and sexual orientations, YAWR chose "War and Racism" especially because of the close ties between war and racial superiority. There are three central ideas connecting war and racism:

1.)Racial Superiority and Wartime Propaganda: Wars must always have a common enemy to hold together and justify the cause for violence. During WWII the Nazis used lies and propaganda to demonize the Jews and in Vietnam the US exaggerated anti-communist threats turning an entire country into a warzone. Too often nations like the US blur the lines between an enemy nation and the nation's people itself. With the help of racially charged media and propaganda we end up fighting wars not against a single regime but against entire peoples. Today's "War on Terror" has attempted to turn many middle-easterners and followers of Islam around the globe into the enemy. Overly simplistic ideas of these people perpetuated by our media make us fearful and resentful of their ideas. In reality, though, these people are no less human than ourselves. Add to this the fact that we have not fought a true war in a caucasian country for more than 50 years and you see that there are definitely racial undertones in our nation's justification for war.

2.)Cultural Erasement Abroad: With war and occupation comes the inevitable erasement of a peoples culture. Fighting in the Phillipines, Africa, and Iraq has shown this as local traditions are squashed by modern day American imperialism and the unavoidable impressment of Western ideas, economy, and culture. Around the world the US's military and economic involvement in foreign governments forces local people to comply with standards and ideals which, like democracy and economic control, tend to inevitably strip people of their heritage. In Iraq we are currently seeing another side effect of prolonged war and occupation as over 2 million refugees have fled the country. The destruction of the country's social fabric will be felt long after the war has ended and may cause a permanently crippled state as many of those refugees are the wealthy and intellectual elite necessary to rebuild the nation. The Iraq War and all wars throughout history permanently devastate ethnic culture in war-torn nations tragically erasing racial and ideological diversity.

3.)Racial Repression at Home: No doubt, you have at one point in the last 5 years looked upon a person of middle-estern origin with fear or disdain while they were driving a taxi or making a phone call at the airport. This is the beginning of racial repression here at home. During wartime repression begins with the government's over-simplification of "the enemy" through the media. We begin to fear our neighbors and fellow Americans. We can justify the stripping away of rights and unconstitutional privacy-loss and jailings of certain individuals who "may be associated with terrorists" or the enemy. The United States did this on a large scale during WWII when they put 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans into internment camps. We allow our government to divide us out of fear and feelings of insecurity. Repression continues as the government wages war unequally, drawing upon people of the lower classes to fight, some of whom tend to be more of a certain racial minority.

Goals and Campaigns:

1.)Stop Military Recruiter access to high school students on campus---- Concerned with aggressive recruiting targeting poor and underprivaleged youth, students have begun taking a stand against military recruiters presence on public high school campuses. While the rest of the country goes about its day to day lives of work and school, our country is currently waging an unjust war using lower class citizens as cannon fodder, enticing these students with the promise of cash bonuses and college education (a process which many call "the poverty draft"). It is our job to stand up for these disenfranchised areas of society and make sure they do not bear the brunt of this illegal war. We can do this through education and fighting to kick predatory recruiters off our campuses.

2.)End the Iraq War now----No one can honestly argue that war is never the answer. But one can argue that war is waged for the wrong reasons, with costs that are far too high, and objectives that are neither probable nor possible. The truth is we will never win hearts and minds, we will never calm long-standing civil unrest and violence, and we will never be sure that our "objectives" have been completed. Rather than wage this never-ending war we must end it immediately, seeing that the present costs are too high in lives, injury, and finance and that with the energy and money we have, and will have spent, we could use it better applying it towards fixing our environment, our communities, and our schools. It is time to end this war and bring our troops home!

The Renton YAWR chapter has been busy over the past year. Here's a look at some of their accomplishments:

-Confronted military recruiters in cafeteria and at EMP homecoming

-Participated in the November 2nd Walkout protesting military recruitment in schools and the War in Iraq

-Gathered 250 signatures from throughout the RSD community asking the school board to remove military recruiters.

-Die-in in the courtyard protesting mounting costs of war in US soldiers (2750), finance (expected $2 trillion), wounded (>10,000), and Iraqi civilian casualties (>100,000).

-Several Renton High students have been speaking in front of thousands at anti-war rallies around Seattle and Washington state.

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