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This week, Lyle Rubin, a former Marine who was sent to Afghanistan, will visit high schools and college classes in New York City as part of World Can’t Wait’s We Are Not Your Soldiers program. In this small but important way, we are intervening with students who are in danger of signing up with the U.S. military.
We are grateful to those of you who have supported this project which brings veterans into high school and college classes to speak to students about their real experiences in the US military occupying other countries. We look forward to your continued support and the support of others to bring this program to more students throughout New York City and to grow it so that it can reach out to students around the country.
Please help us spread the word
World Can’t Wait’s We Are Not Your Soldiers project is starting its twelfth year of visits to high schools and college classes with recent veterans of U.S. wars of terror. We are now beginning to schedule our class visits for the fall semester.
With the Trump/Pence Regime envisioning and engaging in even more militaristic engagements and gearing up to expand those wars to additional countries via both traditional and drone warfare (as well as nuclear threats), it is more important than ever to go in to speak to students who are largely unaware of what’s happening internationally.
At the Left Forum in NYC on June 3, 2017 veterans with the We Are Not Your Soldiers project of World Can’t Wait present what they do in high school and college classrooms where students have grown up under continual wars, know very little about them and may be considering joining the U.S. military with no first-hand knowledge of what it really entails.
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| Joe Urgo and Lyle Rubin speaking March 20, 2017 to college students |
Since 2008, the We Are Not Your Soldiers project has visited many high school and college campuses bringing the message that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a deadly moral, psychological and physical toll on soldiers while bringing death, grievous injury, displacement and suffering to the people of those countries. The We Are Not Your Soldiers project is ready to visit your school or classroom in the Spring semester with Iraq/Afghanistan-era veterans to talk about their on-the-ground experience in occupying countries, where civilians pay the price.
An NPR story on Monday carried this headline: "Expansion Plans At Arlington National Cemetery Cause Environmental Concerns." Only environmental concerns? Are there any other concerns that anyone can think of? I mean if, for example, "All Things" were going to be "Considered," would there be any other things worth considering?
A new military-themed reality show from NBC, entitled “Stars Earn Stripes,” debuts tonight. The show “enthusiastically melds warfare and fame,” as a Washington Post review today put it. It features eight celebrities (using the loosest definition of that term) — such as husband-of-Sarah Todd Palin, former Superman Dean Cain, and former boy band member Nick Lachey — paired up with “military and law enforcement veterans, including a Green Beret, a SWAT officer, two Marine sergeants, a retired member of the Delta Force and two Navy SEALs”, whom NBC hails as the “Bad Ass Operatives.” They’re all under the “command” of Gen. Wesley Clark, who once actually thought he should be President, as he co-hosts this reality show with former Dancing with the Stars host Samantha Harris (subjecting oneself to the two preview videos below, one wonders how much NBC had to pay to purchase Gen. Clark’s dignity in full: probably more than the Terror group MEK paid him to become its loyal shill).
Vets Throw Medals Away
As author, columnist and war correspondent Chris Hedges wrote, war “gives [Americans] purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of our lives become apparent.”
Through Memorial Day weekend, director David Zeiger is making three powerful films about the antiwar GI movement - Sir! No Sir!; 
Unfinished Symphony; and This is Where We Take Our Stand - available free on his youtube channel. Don't miss them - they'll come down after Monday!
If you haven't yet seen it, now is the time to watch the stirring, powerful, historic scenes of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans hurling their metals at the NATO summit in Chicago last Sunday. www.democracynow.org/2012/5/21/no_nato_no_war_us_veterans
Nothing speaks more to the power and importance of soldiers and veterans condemning and opposing the criminal wars they were a part of. And nothing highlights the importance of history more than today's veterans mirroring one of the most powerful moments of the soldiers' and veterans' movements against the Vietnam War forty years ago.
I can personally attest to how widespread the practice of soliciting prostitution was and certainly still is for U.S. Servicemembers. |
As the Secret Service sex scandal continues to unfold, and implicates active duty military personnel, what comes as a surprise to me is not the details of the sex or the drunkenness, but that the American public would expect anything different from our men in uniform!
Having been in the Army for five years, and having spent more than four of them overseas, I can personally attest to how widespread the practice of soliciting prostitution was and certainly still is for U.S. Servicemembers. The fact that it seems many citizens seem not aware of this defies common sense to me.
Because humanity & the planet come first...
World Can't Wait mobilizes people living in the United States to stand up and stop war on the world, repression and torture carried out by the US government. We take action, regardless of which political party holds power, to expose the crimes of our government, from war crimes to systematic mass incarceration, and to put humanity and the planet first.
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