Posted on 05/04/2005 5:09:58 AM PDT by StoneGiant
OPINION: Supporting The Troops? Not On Campus
- Cinnamon Stillwell Wednesday, May 4, 2005
It's been a tough couple years for America's antiwar movement. Unable to effect change at the ballot box and frustrated by the lack of popular support for its agenda, the antiwar crowd has turned its sights on the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and other military recruitment on college campuses across the country.
It's becoming increasingly common for antiwar activists to stage protests and disruptions at college job fairs involving military recruiters. The greater Bay Area, in particular, has become a locus for such activity, with recent protests at San Francisco State University, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.
Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong or illegal with exercising one's First Amendment rights and staging a peaceful protest on campus. But activists are not content to simply protest the presence of military recruiters; they have taken to adopting stronger measures. In San Francisco and Santa Cruz, mobs of protesters disrupted job fairs, forced military recruiters to leave and succeeded in either significantly delaying or shutting down the entire event. As a result, students looking for career advice and opportunities, whether military or otherwise, were largely prevented from doing so.
If one chooses not to join the U.S. military, that's a personal decision. But to stop other students from exploring all their options is bullying at its worst. Besides being unfair, such tactics are unlikely to lead to increased support among fellow students. If anything, the opposite is true. As UC Santa Cruz student Chris Swanson put it, "If they want free speech, they should let people speak to the recruiters."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
In the late 1960s and 1970s they were blowing up ROTC buildings. And I really do not know if the police every tried to find out who did the bombings of the government facilities. The left is a terrorist organization as one can see by its actions in the 60s and 70s and with the PETA support of terrorist and the ELF fires and bombings of today that police have not seemed to be going after in any great haste.
Bravo, Cinnamon!
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