Campus Antiwar Network History

Bring out the Banners.

I’m glad to know about the banner unfurled by Dave Airhart a veteran and
student at Kent State University, atop the climbing wall erected by military
recruiters visiting his campus.

I was at first surprised to hear that “Kent, Ohio for peace” drew such an
emotional, and physical response, according to an eye witness account. But
of course, if peace prevails there will be some jobs lost.

Banners have power. Like headlines, they’re emphatic. They summarize.
They’re easy to remember. They can resonate and reverberate. Suddenly not
only moneyed interests own the ability to make a headline. Bold letters fit
on half a sheet, and then fit our minds and lives.

What a great week to bring out banners.

Students are reminding us that free speech belongs everywhere, especially in
our schools. Not for the sake of disruption, but for the sake of
fundamental, life-saving peace. And for the sake of renewing, and living our
Bill of Rights.
—-
You remind us that we need free speech in surprising places to loosen the
grip that the war machines have on our minds. An expert on political
theater in Brazil, Augusto Boal, has said that though we don’t have
paramilitaries in the US, we have something that can be more insidious. We
have cops in our heads. Silently admonishing ourselves, we have been proper
and predictable.

When our everyday lives have been fitted to the war machine, when history
books teach the history of ‘winning’ wars and little about winning at peace,
when Nuremberg taught us there is no excuse for complicity with orders that
lead to brutality and massacres and genocide, when another child’s life is
on the line tomorrow in many war zones, it’s time to show up with banners
and voices, in public view and at all our schools.
—-
The economic engines that motivate the massacres in Iraq pervade every
aspect of our lives here — our schools, our dollars, our cars, our
corporate media are the gears of those engines. May standing for peace be
likewise as pervasive.

Sunny Miller, Deerfield, Massachusetts

Sunny Miller is the Executive Director of Traprock Peace Center