I have no doubt that our college students today, are more knowledgeable and sharper than we were in the '60s. If I had had a computer when I was working on my undergraduate degree, I would have killed. With the Internet available, today's students can research more quickly and, for those of us who were "typewriter challenged," now even we could "clean some plows," like the golden-fingered electric typists back then cleaned mine. But, in one instance, our 60's students blows today's college students out in space. I am talking about "non-lemming" politics, where today's college students are, simply, clogging up the political discourse as Bush regime loyalists thunder across the US higher education campuses. Where are the Students for a Democratic Society when we need them?
So it zooms through cyberspace that the CIA and the FBI have been going through college students' files across the nation, trying to "identify" possible terrorists, under the pretense of fighting terror. Would we have put up with that nonsense in the 60's? "Project Fight Back" is a government snoop program looking for unpatriotic college students - those who support "Fascism and Hitler." Not in our life time! It was the SDS'ers who raised the student awareness of the war in Vietnam. It seems there is no resistance to our illegal occupation of Iraq, right now, and no resistance to a government which is intrusively, prying more and more into our actions and our lives.
It started at the University of Oklahoma's Student Union with booths set up to sign up students against our occupation in Vietnam. The students were much like I am today, heavily bearded, no care for the fraternity controlled dress codes, and verbally ready to challenge ROTC types, and students in favor of the draft and the war. I suppose, the big difference is that there is no draft, today; but students may rue the day that they didn't become more aware of this adminstrations disregard for their privacy.
It was amazing back then, to watch the student body awareness go from inside the student union and spill out onto the campus. Soon, we were having sit-ins and picketing, to do away with ROTC as a mandated, 2 year service by all male students. Maybe it had to do with the revival of folk music. There is no doubt, today's students simply do not measure up, when it comes to confronting Bush and company pilfering through their private lives. College students, above all else, should take the lead in seeing that today's government is what it is, an administration, out of control, which has caused thousands of deaths because of a half dozen chickenhawks, whose policies could have killed as many as 250,000 people, a high-end estimate by a British group that came up with the number by going block to block on random blocks in Baghdad, to see how many neighbors no longer exist.
The information is every where, yet the students are ignoring it. Today's student union booth-members, now have blogs and are doing a great job in keeping the horrors out and front, but there absolutely is nothing like having "old worn out tennis shoes and well worn t-shirts" in the student unions across the nation.
How can we overlook the children killed, directly by bombs and indirectly by playing with live, unexploded, cluster bombs? We hear all the whining from the military about how all the good they are doing, isn't making the news. I regurgitate at the thought. All the good deeds in the world cannot bring back the innocent civilians and children killed by cluster bombs and our occupation of Iraq. I truly believe there were alternatives to war, to flush out Saddam. I thought, at first, the gathering of troops on the border of Iraq, was a brilliant faint to scare Saddam and family out of Iraq. I was disgusted when our troops were ordered to head for Baghdad - an army unprepared for what they were asked to do.
Idiots in the military kicked out 200 gay military members who were trained as Arabic translators, the most important job in Iraq. This whole war was handled by rank amateurs. The professional soldier in the Pentagon is now a joke, and we are staring, darkly into the worst presidency in the history of the United States.
College students, rise up! It is time to form an SDS, before you lose your right to refuse to choose between the Iraqi desert or Baghdad. Is any war worth killing one small baby or an elementary student? What kind of hypocrites do we have who scorn women who choose to terminate a fetus, while cheering as our bombs kill already born children. Only fools and stooges give up their rights of privacy. It's only one step from the penthouse to the out-house!
Is a 34 year retired educator with a Masters Degree in Counseling - a free-lance writer with articles in Spanish and English Guideposts, Mothering, Oklahoma Observer, Oklahoma Gazette, Westview, Oklahoma Reader, The Lookout, Christian Standard ... . The author has the largest number of published "letters" in the history of Time magazine and NEA Today. Just had an LTTE in NEWSWEEK in December, 2007. Dale W. Hill is married with 5 children, 4 grand-children, one foster child, and 4 foster grandchildren. He and his wife, Marcella, live near Anadarko, Oklahoma, at which school he retired in 2002. Hill is a computer collector, writer, and musician. Hill is a historian of Country Music, with 1972 Ovation and Martin BackPacker guitars. Favorite diatonic harmonica is a Hohner Special 20 and all chromatics, that "...scream The Blues!!"
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