The Mission of a Generation
Tour spoke to three morning assemblies at Freemont High School. Approximately 3-400 students attended the
assemblies at this urban high school.
The student body at Freemont is almost completely Black and Latino.
The 16 year-old student who brought the tour to Freemont
hosted the assemblies and spoke before his peers about the crimes of the Bush
Regime. As the students filed into the
assembly sometimes they would clown around, excited to be out of class and have
a break in the routine. At one point
some students jokingly changed “we love Bush, we love Bush!” and the young man
who hosted the events boldly spoke out to his classmates and declared that they
needed to stop acting like the monkey’s they [the Bush Regime] say we are. He spoke before Anastasia, Liam, and Sunsara
stating that he knew that all of his peers are smart, that he knows they all
know what is going on and that they have the ability to see and understand the
truth and act to change the world.
Anastasia opened one of the assemblies by asking the
students if they knew people in the US
military who were in Iraq,
or if they knew people who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. Many students raised their hands and they
were encouraged to share their knowledge and experiences. The students said that they felt the real
reason the US invaded Iraq was for
oil and President Bush’s greed. Liam
illustrated how Bush claimed the war was over claims that Iraq held Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how
this lie was exposed in the year following the invasion of Iraq.
Over 80% of the students at Freemont raised their hands when
asked if they had experienced brutality or harassment from the police. The students engaged discussion around how
the Bush Regime always states that the war is to ensure the safety of people in
the US, but people in the US are being brutalized and dying at the hands of the
police. While the Bush Regime claims to
be protecting the people, thousands of people died and many more were left
homeless and dislocated after the city of New Orleans was abandoned during
Hurricane Katrina.
Throughout the morning at Freemont Liam kept returning to
examples of how every positive change in history from the Civil Rights
movement, to the struggle for women’s equality were fought and won by
people. These battles were not won by waiting
for Congress to pass laws. Liam brought
the focus on how people in this country must make it their mission to drive out
the Bush regime.
The student host of the assemblies at Freemont challenged
his classmates to envision and describe the kind of future they wanted to see
for the world. He said that in the past
the rulers of the world got rich off of the slavery of their ancestors and
their ancestors had to fight and they did so what were the youth of today going
to do now. Throughout the week
Anastasia, Liam, and Sunsara found inspiration in the leadership and
determination of the students they met.
-Araby, Campus Speaking Tour Coordinator