Revolution #82, March 18, 2007
This call can be found at the website of the organization World Can't Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime, at worldcantwait.org.
Call for Student Walkouts:
March 20th—No School, No Business As Usual
Whoever you are...
Wherever you are...
Walkout on March 20th
End the War Now
Drive out the Bush Regime
The U.S. war machine has Iran and its people in the cross hairs – and there is every reason to believe the threats on Iran are serious and U.S. military strikes would engulf the entire region in the flames of war and chaos.
If you had known about Hiroshima in advance, what would you have done to stop it? We face a cataclysmic moment on the horizon, as bodies continue to pile up on the streets of Baghdad.
March 20th marks the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 4 years of U.S. air strikes, massacres, economic standstill, military curfews and cities left in rubble. 4 years of a war that has created 4 million Iraqi refugees and a country that has been ravaged by a civil war initiated and perpetuated by the U.S. government. Whether or not Bush’s troop escalation “stabilizes” Iraq, this war has been unjust from the beginning and will only continue to be an illegal occupation.
At a time when your government is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, your silence is complicity. The war in Iraq, the government’s use of torture, and domestic spying do in fact rise to the highest levels of criminality, and failure to indict the Bush administration for carrying out these crimes will have horrible repercussions for future generations.
The Bush regime’s drive for global empire has brought about a chilling “new normalcy” of immigrant roundups, spying, fear campaigns, and a restructuring of the law that makes it difficult to distinguish our current society from a police state. While students in the U.S. are making plans for their future, the Bush regime is cementing a fascistic agenda into place that will radically alter the world our generation will inherit. Any progress society makes will be overshadowed by the fact that the government is openly torturing people. The ability for youth to engage in critical thought is being dramatically undermined by a Christian fundamentalist assault on everything from gay rights to evolution to reproductive rights.
We face an unprecedented situation that calls for unprecedented resistance. We saw the sparks of that resistance catch and begin to spread on February 15th when students on twenty seven campuses gathered in protests and strikes against the war. On March 20th, this resistance must grow. On this day we must expand and escalate resistance on campuses that goes beyond symbolic protest into stopping business as usual. We refuse to allow “the acceptable political framework” to put limits on what is possible. We refuse to wait until 2008. We refuse to hide behind the hopes that those in the halls of power are going to fix things.
As the world reflects on 4 years of war with Iraq, resistance erupting from college campuses and high schools could signal a new phase of resistance and struggle that places its energies and hopes in the kind of independent, massive resistance that could bring an end to this war, prevent the launching of future wars and change the direction of society. As the U.S. military continues to sink into a deeper crisis, a generation of youth on a mission to end the war and drive out the Bush regime from within the empire could have a profound impact on the outcome of the historic moment we face today. Resistance where we live and where we go to school, resistance that opens up space for soldiers to speak out, resistance that pulses with a culture of defiance, and resistance through finding the ways to bring these crimes to a halt.
This is what the people of the world need; this is what the rulers in the halls of power fear.
On March 20th, every student needs to ask: where do I stand and what will I do?
The whole world is watching!
Every generation has a mission—Ours is to drive out the Bush regime!
More information about this call for student walkouts is available online at worldcantwait.org.
Or write to: youth_students@worldcantwait.org
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