Report on the selective slavery system and military recruitment in schools

I am back jack
From an illegal occupation
Invasion ... colonization
That is totally whack

Done kilt, and spilt
With no thought to who
To’ up with guilt

And now I am back jack
With a mixed-up mind
Wanting to know
Who I should blame

And what should I do

- from “Kilt and Spilt” by Corporal P

As I walked home from the powerful anti-war, anti-colonization march and rally on Saturday, the words of my friend and poet, Corporal P, who just returned from Iraq, began to flood my mind. “Watch out, brutha. They’ll get you next.”

My friend spoke in his deep, foreboding voice, which makes him seem a lot older than his 19 years. He was trying to scare me about an upcoming draft, which he is convinced the current Amerikkkan government has in the pipeline.

At first I didn’t listen, but recently, my editor suggested I look at the Bigga Pikcher, i.e., the impact of what my editor refers to as the No Child Left Alive Act (No Child Left Behind) on the youth of Amerikkka. Upon examination of this messed-up “act,” which was co-opted by Bush Cheney Inc. for their latest coup, it requires that parents who enroll their children in public schools automatically register them with Selective Service.

Selective Service spends every hour of every day planning for the heinous crime of conscription. That is who they are. It is what they do. They are like the Terminator; they would draft your grandmother if the order came down.

In my research for information on the draft, I discovered http://www.draftresistance.org, which refers to the Selective Service system as the Selective Slavery system and lists seven reasons why you should never register for Selective Service, including the fact that the more people register, the more it appears like Selective Service could actually launch a successful draft.

Personally, as a very low-income young African Descendent man who is trying to come up and out of poverty by getting an education, I ended up registering ‘cause I thought I had to, but through this website I learned that that too is another fallacy. They gave an alternative resource for college funding. The Fund for Education and Training (FEAT) will give you money for college if you refuse to register. So don’t register! Contact FEAT at 1830 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20009-5732, (202) 483-2220, fax (202) 483-1246.

And of course, all of this draft mess will, like all military recruitment, have the worst impact on poor folks. Last week, College not Combat, an anti-military recruiting coalition, held a protest in front of an army recruiting office in downtown San Francisco. The main point of their campaign is kicking out all army recruiters from Bay Area schools, because the military systematically targets for recruitment those most harmed by the misplaced priorities of the political establishment: working class children and people of color. And more often than not, like in the case of my now homeless Iraqi veteran friend, the promises of financial support amount to nothing.

As I got on the BART to return to Oakland, filled with truth from the day and the strength to resist the pervasive pro-military lies, I couldn’t help noticing a pile of military recruitment brochures emblazoned with the oldest lie of them all: “Be all you can be,” or, as my friend re-named it, “Kill all you can see.”

For more work by PNN youth in media, go on-line to http://www.poormagazine.org. More anti-recruitment stories are inside this issue of the Bay View.

http://www.sfbayview.com/032305/killall032305.shtml