Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know

Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access-What Every Young Woman Should Know 

 

 Frank Jackman comment:

 

One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.

        

To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).

 

Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.  

 

Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project   

 

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Tylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

From Veterans For Peace-As The War Clouds Become More Ominous Donate To An Organization Of Gals And Guys Who Know War First Hand-And “Got Religion” For Peace

From Veterans For Peace-As The War Clouds Become More Ominous Donate To An Organization Of Gals And Guys Who Know War First Hand-And “Got Religion” For Peace

Free Russian Interference In 2016 Elections Whistle-Blower Reality Leigh Winner Now!

Free Russian Interference In 2016 Elections Whistle-Blower Reality Leigh Winner Now! 

January 20 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm The Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018: The People Persist

January 20 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

The Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018: The People Persist

n January 20th, 2018, We the People of New England will take to the streets again to show that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights. Rain or shine, we welcome everyone to our event, including families and people with disabilities.

Read the FAQ’s and see the Official Facebook Page for the latest updates

Speakers

The January Coalition is thrilled to announce our roster of confirmed speakers for the Cambridge/Boston Women’s March 2018. Our speakers are all amazing women from a broad range of experiences, and they reflect the many identities and issues that intersect with women’s rights.

Don’t recognize some of the names? We’ll be profiling our speakers and their accomplishments individually in the days to come, so keep checking back!

Elected Officials:
Marc McGovern, Mayor of Cambridge
Maura Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts
Marjorie Decker, State Representative
Sumbul Siddiqui, Cambridge City Council

Community Speakers:
Rhoda Gibson, MassADAPT
Valentine Moghadam, Northeastern University
Laura Rotolo, ACLU Massachusetts
Nichole Mossalam, CAIR Massachusetts
Andrea James, Families for Justice As Healing
Tina Chéry, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute
Michelle Cunha, Massachusetts Peace Action
Savina Martin, Poor People’s Campaign
Eva Martin Blythe, YWCA Cambridge
Tray Johns, #Fedfam4life
Aleksandra Burger-Roy, NEIC
Freedom for All Massachusetts (speaker TBA)

MC: Zayda Ortiz, Indivisible Mystic Valley

More logistical information is coming soon! Accessibility information will be posted here: https://www.facebook.com/events/862995990536253/permalink/884560728379779/

STATEMENT OF VALUES:

1) We are a coalition of diverse social justice, human rights, disability rights, women’s rights, and peace organizations that are coming together on the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration to voice our opposition to an administration that is systematically eroding the rights of women and other marginalized people, dismantling and destroying our democracy, and putting the entire world at risk.

2) We have come together to affirm our common values, and we seek to ensure the rights of all people to liberty, dignity, and equal protection under the law.

3) We are dedicated to the guarantee of these basic human rights for all individuals, regardless of gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, race, age, religion, nationality, immigration status, disability, economic status, geographical residence, health status, culture, and political affiliation, not just in the United States but across the planet.

4) We believe that we are strengthened as a society by our diversity, and we are committed to protecting and passing laws that protect and sustain the rights of all people in our multicultural and multiethnic society.

5) We are united to resist the harmful consequences of President Trump’s administration on women, other marginalized groups, and the planet itself.

6) We envision this event as an occasion to recognize the resistance efforts undertaken thus far, and to further mobilize our collective energies for the year ahead.

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Co-Hosts and Endorsers

List of groups co-hosting the event, in alphabetical order:
Boston Persists—Events for the Resistance
Cambridge Area Stronger Together
Cambridge-Somerville for Change
Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church
Human Rights Festival
Indivisible Mystic Valley
Indivisible Somerville
March Forward Massachusetts
Massachusetts Peace Action
Massachusetts People’s Budget Campaign
New England Independence Campaign
Not One Penny — Tax March
We Unite Organizations
… more coming soon!

List of groups endorsing the event:
American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts
MassADAPT
PowerMASS
Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice, and the Environment
… more coming soon!

If you would like to volunteer or join us as a cosponsor, please contact us at januarycoalition@gmail.com.

We need your help (including your money) to put on a great event!  We need $10,000 to cover the costs of a stage, sound equipment, portable restrooms, a generator, etc. and have raised $3,550 as of January 15.  Every grassroots penny comes from YOU.  Donate on Paypal or on Eventbrite.

 

Make checks payable to Massachusetts Peace Action Education Fund, write “Women’s March 2018” on the memo line, and mail to MAPA EF, 11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138

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The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s 

Lucille In Mind

  

 By Bradley Fox, Jr.  

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlowe on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able unlike my older brother, Prescott, to call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You, Sweet Little Sixteen, Let’s Have A Party, Be-Bop-a-Lula, Bo Diddley, Peggy Sue and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family, Buell Kazell, Jimmy Rodgers, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country), the blue grass music , and the protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know Chicago, blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and of course Mississippi John Hurt. But those guys basically stayed in the South and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they had made their own pacts with the devil. Praise be.               

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life

The “Cold” Civil War Rages In America-In The Second Year Of The Torquemada (Oops!) Trump Regime- Immigrants, Trans-genders, DACAs, TPSers, Media People, Leftists, Hell, Liberals Know Your Constitutional Rights-It May Save Your Life     

By Frank Jackman

Over the first year of the Trump regime as this massive control freak regime has plundered right after right, made old Hobbes’ “life is short, brutish and nasty” idea seem all too true for a vast swath  of people residing in America (and not just America either) I have startled many of my friends, radical and liberal alike. Reason? For almost all of my long adult life I have been as likely to call, one way or another, for the overthrow of the government as not. This Republic if you like for a much more equitable society than provided under it aegis. This year I have been as they say in media-speak “walking that notion back a bit.” Obviously even if you only get your news from social media or twitter feeds there have been gigantic attempts by Trump, his cronies and his allies in Congress to radically limit and cut back many of the things we have come to see as our rights in ordinary course of the business of daily life. This year I have expressed deep concerns about the fate of the Republic and what those in charge these days are hell-bend of trying to put over our eyes.

Hey, I like the idea, an idea that was not really challenged even by the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in their respective times that I did not have to watch my back every time I made a political move. Now maybe just every move. This assault, this conscious assault on the lives and prospects of immigrants, DACAs, TPSers. Trans-genders, blacks, anti-fascists, Medicaid recipients, the poor, the outspoken media, uppity liberals, rash leftist radicals and many others has me wondering what protections we can count on, use to try to protect ourselves from the onslaught.

I, unlike some others, have not Cassandra-cried about the incipient fascist regime in Washington. If we were at that jackboot stage I would not be writing, and the reader would not be reading, this screed. Make no mistake about that. However there is no longer a question in my mind that the “cold” civil war that has been brewing beneath the surface of American society for the past decade or more has been ratchetted up many notches. Aside from preparing politically for that clash we should also be aware, much more aware than in the past, about our rights as we are confronted more and more by a hostile government, its hangers-on and the agents who carry out its mandates.

I have been brushing up on my own rights and had come across a small pamphlet put out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a good source for such information in these times. I have placed that information below.

As the ACLU disclaimer states this information is basic, should be checked periodically for updating especially the way the federal courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme  Court have staked the deck against us of late. In any case these days if you are in legal difficulties you best have a good lawyer. The other side, the government has infinite resources, so you better get your best legal help available even if it cost some serious dough which tends to be the case these days with the way the judicial system works.

Most importantly when confronted by any governmental agents from the locals to the F.B.I. be cool, be very cool.  

The Lady In The Bell Jar-The “One Life: Sylvia Plath” At The National Portrait Gallery

The Lady In The Bell Jar-The “One Life: Sylvia Plath” At The National Portrait Gallery

By Frank Jackman

I have known the name Sylvia Plath for a long time, maybe since the time of her suicide when I was still in high school and my senior year English who was a great influence on all her charges especially about literature was pretty broken up about that tragic event. While I may have known about Sylvia Plath and her well-known (and still well-known) book The Bell Jar and of her poetry in those days what she had to say, what poetry she wrote did not “speak” to me.

How could such a sensitive soul (but also much else as the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery points out including a sense of humor, a wry sense) speak to a hard-bitten corner boy whose literary heroes if he had any centered on guys like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Tough guys writing for a tough hard-shell world. Even later, college later, when I had a girlfriend who was crazy for whatever Ms. Plath wrote (she did her senior thesis on Ms. Plath if I recall) and who endlessly coaxed me to at least read The Bell Jar I bucked her. (Needless to say that relationship did not last too long). It was not until later, not until after a whole bunch of Army experiences during the Vietnam War kind of broke a lot of my youthful prejudices did I finally read her work. That is when I got why that Plath-crazed young women was so insistent that I take the plunge. And it is not too late for you as well.   

    

 

SW Feature: THE DEPORTATION OF SIHAM BYAH-Free Her Now-Read On

Catch up with this week's top articles with SocialistWorker.org's Weekend Edition Can't see images? Click here... SW Feature: THE DEPORTATION OF SIHAM BYAH Siham Byah was stolen away from her family  N. Montalvo and Kay Sweeney | A 40-year-old single mother and longtime freedom fighter in Boston was deported without warning shortly after Christmas. Why am I in this cell?  Siham Byah | Read excerpts from letters by Boston activist Siham Byah while she was held in terrible conditions at ICE facilities before her secret deportation. I need my mom, my family and my home  Naseem Byah | The 8-year-old son of a detained Boston activist makes a heartbreaking appeal to the authorities who took his mother away. text SocialistWorker.org P.O. Box 16085, Chicago, IL 60616 773-583-6725 https://socialistworker.org SHARE TWEET FORWARD You received this email because you signed up on our website. Unsubscribe from SocialistWorker.org Alerts

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