Imagine 101

Here's a tidbit from the Berkeley Daily Planet:

Berkeley High Teach-In Targets War and Military Recruitment

By JUDITH SCHERR
Special to the Planet (03-25-05)

The military recruitment budget is $3 billion annually; 90 percent of the people killed in war are civilian noncombatants; 91 percent of Berkeley High students believe the war in Iraq is wrong and illegal; 65 percent of veterans never get their education benefits; 33 percent of homeless men are veterans….

It was more than these factoids splashed across the screen in the school auditorium and the anti-war rap pulsating in the background that kept the Berkeley High students riveted to their seats Wednesday. It was the real life lesson in war, taught by some who touched battle up close and by others who escaped it that kept the teens’ attention.

The idea of the anti-war teach-in—four different presentations given to four groups of about 300 students—was hatched by students studying social justice and social action in CAS, Berkeley High’s Communication Arts and Sciences school. The project was guided by CAS teacher Joanna Sapir.

The first presenter, Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old conscientious objector, brought the war home to the audience, which sometimes gasped in shock, other times tittered with discomfort, as they viewed images depicting the graphic reality of war they had never seen on the evening news.

Delgado was 19, just a bit older than the students he was addressing, when he signed the Army Reserve contract that changed his life. The son of a diplomat who grew up in Egypt and other countries abroad, he said he did not go into the service for college money—his family was paying his way—but because he wanted a change in his life. He thought he’d join the reserves and put on a uniform a couple of days each month.

Soon after the war began in March 2003, Delgado’s unit was deployed to Iraq. “I got to Iraq and felt totally unprepared,” he said.

He told the students that he had always been opposed to war intellectually, but in Iraq he began to understand the meaning of pacifism and began studying Buddhism. After three months, he told his commanding officer that he wanted to apply for conscientious objector status. The process took two years and he was honorably discharged in January.

Delgado said he was upset by many things he observed in Iraq. On various occasions he would see a group of civilians walking and U.S. soldiers would tell them to stop. “They didn’t understand. (The soldiers) would shoot them down,” he said.

Delgado knows Arabic and was able to communicate with the people. For most of the soldiers, though, “every Iraqi was an enemy,” he said.

They would call them “Hajjis,” (normally a reference to those who have made the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca), using the term to denigrate them. He saw a fellow soldier whip children who had annoyed him with a Humvee antenna. He would watch soldiers break bottles over the head of Iraqis as they drove by.

His unit spent six months working at Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were punished with the removal of their tents and blankets during the cold months. Once when the prisoners rebelled and started throwing stones, the guards responded by shooting several of them dead and wounding others.

Delgado showed the Berkeley High students pictures of dead children, and of soldiers degrading corpses. “That’s the reality of war,” he said. “This is what you have to think about.”

Nine percent of the kids not only support the war but actually dare to say so?

Imagine!

Maybe there's hope after all.

posted by Eric on 03.25.05 at 11:40 PM





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