Read and Send to all of the college newspapers in your area today.
State of Emergency – National Student Mobilization – Demand Bush Step Down
by Allen Lang, World Can’t Wait National Student Organizer, 1/30/06
youth_students@worldcantwait.org
On the eve of President
Bush’s State of the Union address,
the nation has plunged into a State of Emergency, with an
administration taking
unprecedented measures in a grab for permanent ‘unitary executive
power’ and the burning desire of millions to stop and change the
direction society is heading under the Bush Regime.
The Bush Regime’s drive to
radically remake
society has turned controversial words like fascism and impeachment
into topics featured in the pages of major newspapers, magazines, on blogs, and the center of raging debates
in cafeterias, break rooms and dinner tables across the country. At this crucial juncture, World Can’t Wait –
Drive Out the Bush Regime’s call for nationwide protests the night of the State
of the Union address (Jan. 31) and the following mobilization in the nation’s capitol on
February 4th needs to be at the center of the controversy, and the
demand for Bush to step down become a reality.
From ‘rendering’ tortured prisoners around the globe to
openly lying about weapons of mass destruction to illegal spying, Bush is
criminally indictable and to remain silent in the face of these atrocities is
to accept them. When there are millions
of people outraged by the nightly news and cannot fathom the idea of remaining
complicit with the very crimes that shock their conscience, there is only one
answer; turn off the television and pour into the streets to demand Bush Step
Down and take his program with him.
Idealist, Ineffective?
What would it mean if Martin Luther King, Jr. never led the
March on Washington? If there was no march in Birmingham?
What would our classrooms look like?
What would the world look like?
In a recent message urging students to take part in the
State of the Union Protests, Howard Zinn said, ‘I remember vividly how
important it was during the Vietnam War that students all over the country
spoke up boldly calling for the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, even
when neither the media nor the Congress had come to that position. But what the
students did was to put withdrawal on the agenda, compel the rest of the
country to consider it, and as the truth about the war became more and more
clear others joined, the movement spread, and policy changed.’
Today, with what is represented in the likely confirmation
of Alito to the Supreme Court, the stakes are even higher. Will science be science in the future? Will
law and public education be determined by the bible? Are you ready to fight in Iran) will you
have a choice? This is real. Checks and balances have not and will not
stop it.
This is only a glimpse of the future we face if the Bush Regime is able
to stay on this disastrous course. Think of how much it will mean
for the victims of Katrina, for the people of Iraq and soldiers in the
VA hospitals
to see campuses around the country erupt in protest and repudiate
Bush’s
program. A glimpse of a future we need to forge ourselves.
Be in DC February 4th and
demonstrate your demand for Bush to Step Down. The future is
unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.