Bringing Truth to the Youth: The Counter-Recruitment Movement, Then and Now
By Emily Yates
Truthout, Saturday, July 16, 2016
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36822-bringing-truth-to-the-youth-the-counter-recruitment-movement-then-and-now?tmpl=component&print=1
Recruiters from the Harrisburg Recruiting Company participate in an event
for high school students with Youth and Education Services at the Maple
Grove Raceway in Reading, Pennsylvania, October 8, 2010.
Military recruitment has targeted schools increasingly effectively while the
counter-recruitment movement is struggling to keep up. (Photo: Christine
June / US Army)
"Back when we started, recruiters were just blatantly lying to the kids,"
said Susan Quinlan, the co-founder and volunteer coordinator of the peace
and justice group, Better Alternatives for Youth--Peace (BAY-Peace). For 12
years, she's been bringing teams of youth into Oakland, California, schools
to inform students about deceptive military recruiting practices. In that
time, she has seen the recruitment climate in schools change
drastically--and not necessarily for the better.
"It used to be that recruiters would make promises to the kids that were
patently untrue, like offering benefits that wouldn't materialize, for
example, so our job was to go in and say, 'No, that's not true,'" Quinlan
said. Then over the years, as the wars grew increasingly unpopular and
recruitment dropped, the military beefed up the benefits and incentives to
more closely match its promises. Many student activists saw that as a
victory, she said, and as a result, the work lost urgency.
"The recruiters are still being dishonest," she said, "but it's become less
obvious. And they haven't gone away. Now, recruitment is back up where it
was before we started, and we're losing our funding."
Divestment from Truth
BAY-Peace's accomplishments include a Youth Manifesto Campaign that
established a student privacy policy throughout the entire Oakland Unified
School District. Yet, this unique organization is about to lose the support
of the city whose youth it serves. And it's not the only one--on a national
level, the counter-recruitment movement is suffering from low funds and low
participation, even as recruiters target younger children and wars rage on.
Rick Jahnkow remembers a time when the military did not have any official
presence in schools. But in 1973, the draft ended, the "all-volunteer" force
began, and a new era of military recruitment strode through American
classroom doors. Right behind it, hustling to keep up, came the
counter-recruitment movement. Nearly 50 years later, the race to reach the
youth has become a marathon, and the Department of Defense has continuously
stepped up its game.
"Since the end of conscription, military recruiting began to evolve based on
the assumption that they couldn't open up a tap and have bodies come pouring
out anymore," said Jahnkow, a former activist in the Vietnam War-era
draft-resistance movement and current program coordinator of the San
Diego-based Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO).
"Recruitment had marketing and strategists," he explained. "That was how it
evolved. As a response, counter-recruitment evolved as well."
Evolution doesn't always mean progress, however. Although activists keep
moving toward the goal of bringing transparency to the military's messaging,
the once-thriving movement's pace has slowed to a crawl. With funding and
public involvement in a lull, the question haunting the minds of
counter-recruiters like Quinlan and Jahnkow is, "What's next?"
Perpetual War--Fighting and Recruitment
The two competing sides, military and counter-recruitment, are as closely
matched in strength as a bull and a Corgi, but counter-recruiters still
attempt to make up in grit, creativity and adaptability for what they lack
in resources, numbers and establishment backing. They've avoided being
entirely consumed by the military's superior staying power in schools
because the counter-recruitment movement is fueled by the one factor that
reliably hinders recruitment--war.
"We now have a movement that's distinguished itself as specifically
counter-recruitment, and it has ebbed and flowed during active wartime,"
said Seth Kershner, co-author of the 2015 book Counter-Recruitment and the
Campaign to Demilitarize Public Schools. "When the war dies down, so does
counter-recruitment. The big change in the movement now is that everyone
doing full-time counter-recruitment is doing it on a volunteer basis. Since
public interest in war has changed, funding has diminished."
The United States has been actively waging two controversial wars for 15
years, but now even progressive support for counter-recruitment is drying
up, Kershner said.
The movement has gone through cycles, Jahnkow said, and the current state of
"perpetual war-fighting," as he and Kershner both call it, has made
Americans less sensitive to aggressive military recruitment tactics.
Counter-recruiters have had to use several alternative strategies to
communicate with youth, due to the unlimited resources and access to schools
that military recruiters enjoy in this climate. As well as visiting high
schools and talking with students about the realities of military service,
counter-recruiters work diligently to promote non-military alternatives for
students and to push legislation regulating the presence of recruiters on
campuses.
"Pervasive Penetration"
In the decades since recruitment in schools began, the practice has grown
considerably.
"This 'new American militarism'... is a response to the challenge of
annually recruiting more than 240,000 new volunteers into the military,"
Kershner said. "The result has been the pervasive penetration of the
nation's schools by military recruiters and a massive propaganda effort to
shape public consciousness and culture."
This appropriately named "pervasive penetration" takes many forms--not only
does the military have a recruitment budget of over $1.4 billion, but
federal policies like the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and its 2015
successor, the Every Child Succeeds Act, actually tie schools' funding to a
requirement to turn over students' information to military recruiters unless
parents specifically "opt out." There's also the massive Junior Reserve
Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program, whose goal is to channel students
into the military after graduation.
Fed up with having their privacy invaded and their curriculum militarized,
students in Oakland, San Diego and Santa Barbara, California, have used both
the hands-on and legislative approaches to counter-recruitment in an effort
to keep the military out of their places of learning. Student activists in
those cities successfully ousted JROTC from the Santa Barbara campus and won
policy changes to restrict military access to students' information and
recruiters' access to schools.
"The legislative approach takes longer, but victories are much easier to
see," Kershner said. "In Massachusetts, for example, a veteran and a high
school student led a coalition to pass a state bill that regulates ASVAB
[Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery] testing in schools. In New
Hampshire, the ASVAB used to be mandatory, and now it isn't. These
legislative victories are important to see as progress--and motivation to
keep working."
Military Curriculum
Ideally, organizations would focus on high schools, but would also have the
numbers and interest to work with middle and elementary schools, Kershner
said. In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, he
reported that the Department of Defense was administering more than a dozen
different programs and spending close to $50 million on K--12 outreach,
targeting students pursuing the STEM fields of science, technology,
engineering and math.
"Twenty years ago, there was hardly anything that sophisticated," Kershner
said. "Now we have these programs, as well as the growth of military-style
charter schools all over the country. It used to just be in Chicago, but now
there are more like two dozen public schools putting students in uniforms
every day."
Despite (or perhaps, because of) the increased military presence in schools,
he said counter-recruitment groups have had difficulty with their own
access.
"It's interesting to note that there is a legal precedent for
counter-recruiters to have equal access... there are more and more groups
that want to be involved in counter-recruiting, but they have great
difficulty getting into schools," Kershner said. "Districts will just
reflexively refuse, but... by allowing recruiters in, schools are creating a
public forum, and opposing views are allowed to be present."
New responses to youth-targeted militarism are regularly being developed,
Jahnkow said, often using technological advances to "present information in
a distilled way." From designing computer games in the 1980s to developing
apps in the 2010s, he and his colleagues in the National Network Opposing
the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) are constantly tracking the best ways to
inform students.
Students and Veterans as Powerful Voices
Throughout the decades, word-of-mouth has continued to be a crucial way to
spread the word about the realities of recruitment, according to Jahnkow.
"If we stand near schools on the corner handing out leaflets to the kids,
they'll bring them into school and start talking about them with their
friends," he said. He believes the second most effective messengers for the
counter-recruitment movement are students themselves, especially those
supported by organizations like NNOMY, BAY-Peace or Project YANO, with whose
help San Diego students effectively organized to rid their schools of the
JROTC program.
But the most powerful voice is that of military veterans, Jahnkow
emphasized. "Veterans expose contradictions," he said. "When we get students
to question what they're told about the military, to think critically, we're
helping them to evolve."
In Counter-Recruitment, Kershner interviews a veteran named Yvette, who
"relishes the chance to talk with the military recruiters she meets in
schools and to challenge the stories they tell students":
She always introduces herself as a veteran when approaching a recruiter and
takes care to be cordial, not confrontational. She shares the pamphlets...
photocopied flyers with titles like Know Before You Go and What Every Girl
Should Know About the U.S. Military. The response from recruiters varies
wildly. "I've had lots of recruiters say, 'Yeah, they need to know that
information'," [Yvette said.] "But then a lot of recruiters look at me like
I'm the scum of the earth."
This pushback from recruiters, as well as the need to relive painful
experiences, can be "an occupational hazard of counter-recruitment" to
veterans, who are already prone to post-traumatic stress that can be
triggered by confrontations, Kershner said. "If you have war trauma,
activism can be very draining."
"In 2009, half of our conference attendees were youth activists," he said.
"Youth are not as interested now. Most of the people doing
counter-recruitment are older folks, and they've reported difficulty
relating to teens. They wish they had more youth and veterans to work with."
June Brumer is one of the "older folks" who has been counter-recruiting for
decades, first as a member of the Central Committee for Conscientious
Objectors, and currently with Grandmothers Against War. Based in Oakland,
she's been visiting classrooms and career fairs with veterans since the
1990s. As grandmothers, it's not too difficult for members of her group to
get into schools ("white hair is helpful," she smiled), but it's not the
grandmothers who capture the students' attention.
"The veteran who speaks to the kids makes the biggest impact," she said.
"The kids want to hear about the veterans' experience, and they want to ask
questions... although over the years, the kids' reaction has changed to
'What war?'"
But these days, Brumer said, it's hard to find enough veterans to
participate.
Even veterans committed to the cause are often unable to keep up the work,
Kershner said. Ever since the so-called "end" of the Iraq war (in quotes
because there are still around 3,600 U.S. troops in Iraq on any given day),
he said both veteran and youth interest in counter-recruitment has dropped.
Hart Viges, an Iraq veteran in Austin, Texas, spends many of his days
talking with high school students about his military experience. He has been
doing counter-recruitment work for nearly 10 years and sees it as a major
part of the long-term struggle against militarism. He finds the work he does
with the direct-outreach group Sustainable Options for Youth to be healing,
if also exhausting.
"To me, every action is significant," he said. "It's the slow grind to the
long game. Every time I leave a school, there is a feeling of accomplishment
that replenishes the soul."
"Plant a Seed, Sow a Harvest"
It's the long game that matters, Jahnkow believes.
"When it comes to planning and strategy, the military is all about that, and
when we don't do that, we shoot ourselves in the foot," he said. "The
movement does see the big picture, but until many more people who are
actively involved in working on various issues pay attention to [long-term
strategy], they're going to keep having to put out fires."
He added, "You might be concerned about Palestine, women's right to choose,
etc., but if seeds are being planted by the military at this point for
people in elementary and high school, you're going to keep having your
movement depressed."
The metaphor of planting seeds is a familiar one, Kershner said. "'Plant a
seed, sow a harvest'--this is recruiters' language. Counter-recruiters need
to be using this language, too." To be most effective, he said, activists
should work with teachers' unions, as individual control over their
curriculum is being lost to the Department of Defense and JROTC programs.
The movement also needs to be training the next generation of activists,
Kershner asserted. "Veterans, especially members of Iraq Veterans Against
the War, can help by sharing their recruitment stories," he said.
"Counter-recruiters can reach out to educators' journals and conferences."
He suggested Americans should be concerned about the privacy violations
schools flirt with when they mandate ASVAB testing and release of students'
scores to recruiters, noting that privacy "isn't just a left-wing issue."
"People aren't aware that recruiters can wander around schools at all
times," he said. "No other group has that kind of access, not even college
recruiters. And there are documented cases of sexual assault by military
recruiters. It really underlines the need for more regulation."
With the military firmly implanted within the educational system, the future
looks like a bumpy one for the counter-recruitment movement, unless
organizations like BAY-Peace and are able to find funding and volunteers to
continue their work. There's literature to be researched and printed,
classrooms to visit, career fairs to attend, school boards and city councils
to petition--all this requires more time, energy and money.
However, counter-recruitment activists aren't giving up anytime soon.
Brumer, who's now in her sixth decade of organizing for peace, has some
advice for those who are interested in getting involved.
"Bring it down to you, what you can do," she said. "There's a saying in the
Talmud: 'If you save one life, you save the world.' So I feel like if I keep
one kid out of the military, I've done my job."
Emily Yates is a writer in many modes, from songs and poetry to essays and
articles. She began writing professionally in 2002, when she enlisted in the
US Army as a "journalist" (public affairs specialist), and has been trying
to make up for this error in judgment since getting out of the military in
2008. In an effort to use her powers for good rather than evil, she now
performs as a comedic/political singer-songwriter and volunteers with Iraq
Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace.
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