Thoughts on Nov.2nd and immediate, major steps to transform College Campuses into centers for Driving the Bush Regime from power.
Allen Lang youth_students@worldcantwait.org
November 2nd marked a real launch in a society-wide movement to drive out the Bush Regime and ushered in the opening round of a two-sided fight for the future. Thousands of High School youth defied heavy suppression to take the streets in protest and at least 50 College campuses took part in the first major step in a movement to drive out the Bush regime. However, driving out a regime in the most powerful country in the world is an unprecedented goal not to be taken lightly and is hard to see this happening without the Campuses shaking things up a lot more in society. So while putting this positive major step in the forefront, there are some real leaps we need to make in this rapidly changing world whose future will be decided by how we decide to act (or not act).
“As challenging as it sometimes is, most students can’t defend the actions of this regime and are horrified by the nightmarish society it is forcing on us all. And I’ve found that when we refuse to compromise on what is actually at stake for the people of this country and the world and the survival of the planet itself ( we are able to reach inside people and move them.”- Sunsara Taylor’s Message to Students
Confronting Reality in Order to Change It
A decisive question confronting many student organizers is a common scenario of: you’ve distributed boxes and boxes of World Can’t Wait Calls; you’ve called up all the people on your contact list; you’ve caused a stir dramatizing Guantanamo torture victims; you’ve spoken (or busted in) in front students in classrooms–and not everyone agreed with you but most did. So where was the critical mass on the 2nd? Simply tossing it up to apathy oversteps a big part of the picture.
It’s not uncommon to see students with anti-Bush pins walking through campus. Millions of people watch the nightly news in horror and agonize over the future we face under Bush. But as we saw in the aftermath of Katrina or the recent Supreme Court hearings, there is a deadly paralysis that conditions us to accept the unacceptable.
“There is not going to be some magical pendulum swing.” Every day, we need to challenge people by stepping to them with the truth that they cannot find comfort or common ground with some Democratic savior. There is no referee. “We don’t have to do anything because Bush is on his way out anyway” is (a) not true and (b) paralyzing.
In a general sense, the America we knew before 9/11 is never coming back. That is for real and people have to be acting with that understanding.
But we also have to be drawing from things like the “Today’s Reason to Drive Out the Bush Regime” section on the website and put it to people: you think the people in power are going to heed the critique that torture “tarnishes our credibility in the international arena”? Think again. The Senate just passed a Bill that upholds Bush’s ability strip “enemy combatants” of their rights and Bush can thank the Democrats for helping this pass on a narrow margin. Do you think it will stop with abortion? Is birth control not in the Bush regime’s cross hairs? If you are counting down until the end of Roe V Wade, why do you think it will be different with birth control?
We cannot half-step on this fact: to transform our campuses into centers of this drive-out-the-Bush-regime movement, we will have to engage in sharp struggle with our peers, with professors, with heads of student clubs and with ourselves. The fact that it’s controversial to struggle with other people and to fight for the truth, only underscores the urgency for this movement to spread like wild fire on the campuses and uproot the politics-as-usual mentality with bold and challenging actions. The “Bring Home the Reality of Back Alley Abortion Days” Street Theater and other creative actions need to bring to life the stark reality of the 7 “Your Government” points from our Call. This is very real. This is not exaggeration. Literally thousands of women will die if Roe V Wade is overturned, regardless of how many campuses have Women Centers.
There is also the danger of lumping in the characteristics of High Schools, or even Community Colleges, uniformly with elite and Ivy League schools. We can and have to engage in compelling discussions with Ivy League students who have a considerable amount invested in their studies, who have a lot riding on their GPA and champion a false notion that their professional careers alone, in and of themselves, can take on the enormity of what the world is facing.
Basically, will the brightest minds of a generation be trained to perfect the workings of this Regime’s death machine or will they act with the spirit of Mario Savio’s call to put their bodies upon the gears and wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and make it STOP?
Go to all the medical schools and pose to them: What will it be like to be a doctor in 2006 under the Bush Regime? What good will a medical degree be? What will you be forced or learn to tell women when they find out they are pregnant? Will security guards prevent and carry away distraught visitors from seeing their partners because they are the same gender? Does the Bush agenda simply stop at barring stem cell research? This regime is yanking Evolution out of public schools, while gutting the Science field in higher education and remaking core principals to serve it’s agenda.
Professors in the national spotlight and prominent intellectuals taking a stand with World Can’t Wait can cause reverberations throughout society and be part of changing the political equation in society. At the height of the Vietnam War it was a controversial and historic moment when the leading intellectual figures of the day, like Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer and Dr. Benjamin Spock, crossed police lines to deliever dozens of draft cards in protest of an utterly illegitimate war.
Every day this regime is making it clear they are dead set on putting it all out there in the open and is moving on the urgency to remake every sphere of society to serve their future of a brutally oppressive theocracy. Reglious fanatics with nuke-u-lar weapons.
What To Do Now
Through the twists and turns in our next steps it will be decisive in whether or not we direct everything we do toward driving out this regime, making the World Can’t Wait Call central to all of our work and recognizing the major step we took on Nov.2nd and that we are in a different place. To bring foward a generation to walkout of school because they saw the entire planet was hanging in the balance and will be plunged into darkness unless we drive this regime from power, speaks volumes to what we set in motion on Nov.2nd and the potential for the politics of the Call to connect up with millions of youth throughout society. To bring foward the broad spectrum of people represented on Nov.2nd solely around driving out a regime can mark a turning point in history if we make good on what we set out to do.
There are still millions of youth who don’t know that this movement exists, and that it is the only thing that can meet the enormity of the challenge before us. We can’t leave one stone unturned in saturating the campuses right off of the 2nd. For the people who heard about or were around for Nov. 2nd they need to be barraged with BUSH STEP DOWN everywhere they go on campus.
Study the college newspapers, meet with the Journalism professors, sit down with the columnists around why they need to be part in covering history as it unfolds and featuring ordinary people doing extrodinary things by leading a movement that is set on driving the Bush Regime from power. Full page prints of the World Can’t Wait Call featuring endorsers like Anti-Flag, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Jonathan Kozol in newspapers circulating throughout campus.
We still need to meet or go back and sit down with the different student groups and professors and talk with them about what happened on November 2nd, about the next step in demanding that Bush Step Down and about why NOW is the time to move at hyper-speed in making this demand a reality. We’re not taking NO for an answer. There’s too much at stake in the world.