Category: the nation

With no end in sight to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military recruitment on the decline, a resumption of the military draft looms as a frightening possibility for young people. While many activists have been turning their attention towards anti-recruitment work, resistance to Selective Service registration has taken a back seat.

A cursory search on Google reveals advice that is ridiculously simple-minded. It is unreasonable to ask a young man not to register for Selective Service if he wants to go to college. Anyone who wants to go to college, but cant afford to pay tuition out of pocket, has to resort to student loans. Anyone who applies for student loans must first file a Federal Application for Financial Student Aid. Under federal law, all men between the ages of 18 and 26 are ineligible for FAFSA unless they register for Selective Service. The simple math for this is: Working Class Male Student – Selective Service Registration = No College.

The solution is to register under protest. I realize that this column is a little too late for this year’s batch of graduating high school seniors. After being solicited for some advice by a young comrade in Florida, and looking through my own, old paperwork, I decided to post this information online. I hope it will help tomorrow’s seniors who find it through Google. Perhaps it can help those young people who have already registered for Selective Service, but want to take action anyway.

Just before the war with the eskimos, in 1997, I was a graduating high school senior faced with this dilemma. The advice I received at the time, from the War Resisters League and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors was to register under protest for Selective Service. In order to do this, you should do the following.

You should actively register for Selective Service. Do not merely check that box on your FAFSA that registers you for the SS. Go to your local post office, pick up a SS registration form and mail it in before you apply for financial aid. Include with the registration form a letter from you explaining that you are registering under protest. Here is my own letter from 1997:

As an editor, I may quibble with this young writer’s precise wording, but the essence is there. I am a conscientious objector. If drafted, I will not serve. Those are crucial statements. If I were writing this letter today, I might add, “I am registering under protest in order to apply for federal student financial aid. I have no intention to cooperate with the Selective Service Administration” and “I oppose the war in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and all wars.”

Now, here’s the crucial bit: carbon copy yourself on this letter. Send both copies of the letter, the one to the SS and the one to yourself, via certified mail. Keep all receipts and stubs in a safe place.

Keep the letter that you mailed to yourself sealed and in the same safe place.

The reason that you mail yourself a copy is to save your own skin. What you have in your hands is government certified proof that you were a conscientious objector way back when you were 18-years-old, should you ever be called before a draft board (which was a remote possibility eight years ago, but is not now).

Saving your own skin, as a form of activism, is not particularly satisfying, but you do achieve a secondary goal by sending a direct message to the war machine that you are an active opponent of their scheme. Believe me, they keep track of this stuff. Their statisticians undoubtedly will credit you for representing another ten or fifteen cohorts who didn’t have the nerve to speak up. The more young people who file letters such as these, the more the war machine gets the message that they will have a real problem on their hands should they seek a return of the draft.

When I did this, before our government declared permanent war against invisible enemies, a funny thing happened: the Selective Service Administration wrote me back!

By acknowledging and rejecting my claim of conscientious objector status, the Selective Service Administration provided even more evidence (should I ever need it) that I was a pacifist in 1997, long before the wars and the draft. They also directly acknowledged that they are aware when young people resist compulsory military service (and, again, are almost assuredly keeping statistics on these letters).

I would be curious is a young man who filed a similar letter in 2005 would receive the same kind of response. Please let me know how your own letter is received.

Finally, if you’ve already registered for Selective Service, and filed your FAFSA, you can still take action. In fact, you’re in better shape, since your loans are cleared up, and the SS never rescinds a registration anyway. Send them a certified mailing expressing your desire to rescind your Selective Service registration. Use the same language as I recommended: “I am a conscientious objector,” “I registered under duress in order to qualify for college, “I do not support this or any war.” Your objection will be noted by the statisticians, and hopefully you’ll receive back from the SS a dated letter rejecting your claim of objector status (thereby proving that you were an objector way back when).

The wheels of civil rights justice sure do turn slowly in America. With a curious vigor, authorities are seeking convictions for two of the most famous lynchings of the mid-twentieth century, while the U.S. Senate has recently apologized for not reacting to all those lynchings in a timely matter.

Better late than never? “You’re still doing what you did in 1964,” protests Rita Schwerner Bender. Back in that Freedom Summer, Schwerner Bender and her then-husband, Michael Schwerner moved to Mississippi in order to register blacks to vote. They worked with a Queens College student named Andrew Goodman, and a local black activist named James Earl Chaney. These nosy Jews from New York and their uppity Negro friend drew the ire of the local Ku Klux Klan, whose support went all the way up to the local sheriff, who, on June 21, arrested the three men for speeding and allowed them to be carried off from the jail. Their bodies were found days later, beaten, shot up and burnt to a crisp in their car. The good old boys arrested for the crime were acquitted. Recently, local authorities arrested Edgar Ray Killen, a former preacher they argue was the ringleader of the long-ago crime. “You’re treating this trial as the most important trial of the civil rights movement because two of the three victims are white,” Rita Schwerner Bender complained to the press, after testifying yesterday.

Although famous for galvanizing the Freedom Summer activists in the North (and later inspiring a lame Hollywood movie), Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner’s lynching was by no means the first lynching in Jim Crow South, which dated back to the efforts to establish equal rights in the South right after the Civil War. Congress resisted taking action for 105 years, but their apology doesn’t make all those poor souls who were whipped, hanged, shot, stabbed or beaten any less dead.

Likewise, avenging the lynching that sparked the modern civil rights movement, the murder of Emmitt Till, will not put an end to the struggle for civil rights and equality that it inspired. But that hasn’t stopped the authorities from digging up poor Emmitt’s bones for a new autopsy. That boy’s dead body has already done its service to the movement. It does not deserve to be used as a prop once again.

Back in 1995, 14-year-old Till was visiting his uncle in bloody Mississippi when the brash Chicago youth had the audacity to whistle at a white woman. For his bad behavior, the kid was dragged from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night. He was dredged from the Mississippi River three days later, his bloated corpse riddled with bullets and stab wounds, missing an eye. When his body returned to Chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket to show the world what southern racists do to little black boys. The pictures from his wake sparked a movement. One month later, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for resisting racial segregation on the city’s buses, and Dr. King started the famous boycott.

Needless to say, those accused of Emmitt Till’s murder were acquitted (That could have been any little boy’s body, the all-white jury concluded). Now local authorities may prosecute surviving members of the mob that pulled young Emmitt from his uncle’s home half a century ago.

Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner and Till are martyrs. Their families long ago gave up hope that their killers (most of whom are dead, some of whom are merely old and infirmed) would go to jail. What their families, and those of us who are their children in the movement, need to see is not narrow justice for their specific cases, but, ultimately, “justice for all.”

We live in a country where, 140 years after the Civil War, 50 years after Emmitt Till’s murder and 41 years after the “Mississippi Burning” lynchings, only one out of 100 Senators is black, only one out of nine Supreme Court Justices is black, and none of the 100 state governors are black; cops still regularly pull people over for “driving while black;” blacks are twice as likely as whites to be without health insurance, blacks are twice as likely as whites to suffer from poverty. I could go on and on, but the obvious fact is that we do not have racial equality and justice in this country, and, in fact, we are moving farther and farther away from that goal. These prosecutions of ancient crimes are meant to distract us from continuing the work that was begun by Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner and Till. The ghosts of Mississippi demand action for today, not retribution for yesterday.

Florida, America’s Wang, has been the most shameless corner of the vast right-wing conspiracy for years now. A phenomenon recently lampooned by Tom Tomorrow, policy makers in Florida pick the most ridiculous fights to stoke the flames of their supporters’ torch-and-pitchfork ensembles, even if the fights are completely contradictory to their own rhetoric.

Now comes the latest, a judge has ruled that a 13-year-old girl cannot decide for herself to have an abortion. Judge Ronald Alvarez ruled that the girl is too young and immature to make the momentous decision to have an abortion by herself, plus, he claims he is concerned about the potential effect of an abortion on her physical and emotional health. Now, first of all, a full-term pregnancy and labor is a lot riskier for a little girl than a first-trimester abortion, and, secondly, if the girl is too immature to choose an abortion, how in the hell could she be considered mature enough for motherhood? But, most galling is the fact that under the law in Florida, which does not have a “parental consent” requirement for minors seeking abortions, the choice is the girl’s, and hers alone. Judge Alvarez is, in fact, engaging in judicial activism!

What’s really going on here is that Jeb Bush is pandering to the same “culture of life” crowd that made Terri Schiavo’s last days such a media circus. Under his orders, the Department of Children and Families, sought the initial restraining order preventing the girl, a runaway who is under DCF foster care, from getting an abortion. The DCF cites a contradictory law that prohibits the department from consenting to an abortion for a minor in state care (so, kids who live with their families can choose for themselves, but kids under state care need state permission?!). The injunction is temporary, pending psychological exams that the department requested and the judge has granted. The girl, who is 14 weeks pregnant, is in a race against the clock before state law tells her she is too far along to get an abortion. Bush and the DCF intend to run down the clock.

Ironically, as the Terri Schiavo circus was going on, I remarked to some friends that those of us on the civil rights side of the culture war need to be as cut-throat and calculated as the right, and named this very scenario, a young girl being prevented by the state from having an abortion in time, threatening to force her to have a child that she could not possibly care for when she herself is a child, as the kind that we could champion in the same manner as the right exploited Schiavo. Zany Florida just made this scenario real. It’s time for some wacky protester hijinks from our side.