[PAA-Discuss] anti-DOD demonstration today at UH

[Bill Crosier]

Kris, Ron, Don, Jamilah, Cheryl, and whoever else participated in the demonstration and flyering at UH today:

I'm proud of you.

Even if most students didn't respond, I'll bet you got some of them thinking.  And even more important, I hope you got some of the faculty thinking about their ethics -- those professors attending the DoD meeting on how to get some of our taxpayers' bucks to fund research on how to more effectively kill, maim, and destroy.

I agree it would have been nice if you had received more obvious positive response. But I think it would have been unlikely that one of those faculty members anxious to get DoD research funds would have actually come over to you and said you're right.  I guess we can hope that at least a few of them will realize they have a conscience.  I remember back in the Reagan administration, when DoD was dangling huge grants before the eyes of physics and engineering professors to get them to do Star Wars research, there wasn't much obvious rejection of that immediately, but then gradually a bunch of them and their grad students (not enough, though) got organized and spoke out pretty forcefully against the whole Star Wars program.

Maybe you got more of them thinking today about how DoD could use their research.  At least I hope so.

The next time something like this happens, maybe we can come up with some flyers that the students can better relate to -- maybe something pointing out how their tuition bills are going up because we're spending so much money on the military, etc.  I wish I'd thought of that sooner.

Hang in there and keep it up.

Bill


At 4:45 PM -0500 3/29/07, Ron and Kris Graham wrote:
>Ron and I just got back home a little while ago from the picket line/protest/rally at U of H. We were protesting the presence of the Department of Defense on the campus selling their murderous lies and shit to U of H faculty and students. We weren't getting any response during the picket line portion in front of the Hilton. We did put our flyers and posters up against the windows where the people in attendance were eating lunch. It must've upset their stomachs to see our posters and flyers about the Nazification of the American University and Stop the War Machine and Stop University Complicity because a guy came out and asked us to stop what we were doing. He said people had paid to eat and didn't want to see our signs. Gee whiz. I don't want to have to eat every day and know that our tax dollars are going to blow people up!! I hope every one of those sons of bitches gets a horrid case of diarrhea and acid indigestion that lasts for days.
> 
>Several of us moved to the back of the University Center where the U.S. Navy had set up tents and was passing out free pizza, Cokes and Navy tee shirts while they reeled people in to the meat grinder! Also, some spokespeople for the Houston Rockets were right next to the Navy recruiters letting people shoot hoops to try and win tickets to the next Rockets game. Of course, the Rockets were also encouraging people to visit the Navy booths, so it's obvious to me the Rockets are now pimping for the U.S. Navy recruiter whores. We passed out flyers saying Get out of Iraq and Stop University Complicity! We had a group of students from San Jac Community College show up and hold up a sign reading Stop Military Aggression or something like that. Those kids were great! There were a couple of Army recruiters there, too, who were laughing it up and one even went and stood in front of the sign saying Stop Military Aggression. He was grinning like a shit eating hound and his girlfriend or some girl took his picture. I guess he thought he was being cute. I thought he looked like a complete idiot.
> 
>We passed out a lot of flyers to kids who looked like they really didn't give a shit. I swear, I think the majority of students at U of H are pod people or something. They look completely blank. A couple of students from U of H actually helped us pass out flyers, so I was heartened by that. One female student I handed an Out of Iraq flyer to tore it up and threw it in the trash with great fanfare. I told her to get out of the university and go on over to Iraq if she was so supportive of the war there. She didn't say a word. She just kept on sashaying that ass. What a little bitch! One guy who looked like the missing link tore up one of the signs that Don or Cheryl had made. We had put a sign under a Navy sign that read free food and drink and our homemade sign had something about people being exploited. This guy took great pleasure in tearing up the sign and then running over to the Navy recruiters like a puppy that wanted its head patted. I wanted to knock the hell out of him. From the look on his face, he appeared to have a low I.Q.
> 
>Toward the end around 1:30 p.m. or so, I should've gotten my butt out of there because I had to get our truck to my daughter at school. Jamilah was holding up her sign reading Stop the War Machine. One of the U of H students that was helping us attempted to give a flyer to a tall brunette guy wearing a suit. She said "Stop the War, Impeach Bush." The guy said "I'm not for that" or something along those lines. Jamilah said "I'm not for the war." He came over to her and started debating the righteousness of the war in Iraq stating bullshit like we have to be the big brother of the world. He also said we HAD to save those Iraqi people from the horrible dictator Saddam Hussein who used chemical weapons on 2 million of his own people. I clued numb nuts in to the fact that our own government SUPPLIED the WMD to the horrible dictator Saddam. He went on to say that the people of Iraq are weak and we must democratize them. I clued him in again that one does not democratize a people at the end of a gun or the point of a missile. He kept telling me he understood all about the death and mayhem in Iraq. I told him I didn't care whether he understood or not. I wanted to know how he FELT about all the killing over there. I told him that at least 655,000 Iraqis had been killed along with 3,000+ U.S. soldiers and countless thousands horrifically wounded. I asked him how he FELT about that. This stupid bastard actually said it was NECESSARY!!! I wanted to break his face right then and there. I told him to pull his head out of his ass and wake up! This jerk was an Air Force ROTC cadet. He'll never see combat on the ground. He can just get in his little old war plane and drop bombs on human "targets" and never have to see the ripped and torn bodies of men, women and children. What a stupid little fuck!! How on earth can these people get into school on a university level!!! They seem to be completely uneducable!
> 
>Anyway, Ron said we had to go, which we did because we were running late. I got the truck to my daughter and then came home and helped Ron mow the yard. I had to mow my mad out. It helped a little but not nearly enough.
> 
>I'm really sick of the ignorance of the American people and the large majority of the University kids. They just don't seem to give a shit what's going on in the world. They are more interested in shooting hoops with the Rockets spokespeople, getting free pizza and Coke and a nifty Navy tee shirt! Golly gee, Beave!!! I got me a nifty Navy tee shirt. [Insert the Goofy the dog laugh here.]
> 
>If this is how people are going to react when we protest at the University level then I think we are doomed as a nation. We have become a nation of consumers. We have been dumbed down beyond all belief. Our young people have NO CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS WHATSOEVER!!! Their thoughts must run to when they are going to get laid, drunk, stoned etc.
> 
>I've had it with these nim rods. I know this is going to sound horrible, but I really wanted to punch Mr. Air Force cadet square in the mouth. I'm sick of dealing with morons. I'm sick of dealing with amoral pieces of shit who think it's a NECESSITY to waste human life in order to BRING DEMOCRACY U.S.A. STYLE to a suffering people. This is the absolute height of ignorance and arrogance.
> 
>I'm fed up with all this crap! I sincerely believe we are going to have to have a MAJOR catastrophe in this country to wake these morons up! I hope this country gets seized by China, and we become a third world nation. People are going to have to start hurting and I mean bad before they wake up and realize that we are supposed to be ONE GLOBAL COMMUNITY! For now, they seem content to eat their greasy pizza, drink their Cokes, fondle their Navy tee shirts and listen to hip hop music. I feel I am living in a place that must be akin to the biblical version of hell. I am living a nightmare. Everybody seems to have eaten a big bowl of stupid for breakfast, and this is every day!
> 
>When a person gets educated to what is really going on in the world around her/him, then one realizes that there is NO going back. I'm stuck. I realize I am up to my neck in stupid and shit, and it's all I can do to keep my nose above all the stink! I'm sick of smelling it, seeing it, eating it and rolling around in it on a daily basis. How do you get out of the stupid and shit?!
> 
>As an aside, I love the quote below from Arundhati Roy. She is, as per usual, dead on with her observations. Thanks for posting it, Charlie.
> 
>Kris
> 
>
>From: ChasMauch at aol.com [mailto:ChasMauch at aol.com]
>Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:55 PM
>To: graham2639 at mindspring.com; Discuss at paa-tx.org
>Subject: Re: [PAA-Discuss] Quote from Arundhati Roy
> 
>Thanks for that, Kris. She is brilliant. Here is another of her great quotes, taken from the introduction of the book by Chalmers Johnson entitled "Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic." The quote is an excellent summary of the thesis of Johnson's book (which I highly recommend as chilling but enlightening reading for everyone, and with which I fully agree). Here is the quote:
> 
>"Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance," its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts....Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable."
>ARUNDHATI ROY,
>The Guradian,
>September 27, 2001
>:

-- 
Bill Crosier
paa at crosierbiomed.com     713-641-4941
Progressive Action Alliance   http://progressiveactionalliance.org/
Fear Ends, Hope Begins...   http://kucinich.us/