I attended B.U. and Northeastern’s campuses to protest the on-campus presence of the slippery Raytheon corporate recruiters with my friends, protest singers Leon Litewski and Andy Sepe. The protest was put on by members of Mass. Peace Action, United Against War and Imperialism, Democratic Socialists of America, and a number of students and citizens of good conscience against war and imperial financial folly in Yemen and the rest of the world.
Such things were discussed as the inequalities of our degenerating Republic, the collapse of social services, the never-ending budget for war, but minuscule budgets for schools or childcare. We discussed the disparities in wealth between the White and Black citizens within the city of Boston, and how we’re failing our fellow citizens. We discussed how mere pennies could solve the most grotesque inequality in the world, and yet instead is spent on weapons of death and destruction. A young student of Yemeni descent spoke of the horrors
committed against her former home by her adopted people, and how it tore her compassionate father apart as he attempted to offer refuge to as many Yemenis as possible.
We stood together in fellowship against the abuses of the Imperial Rome of our day. A lonely disingenuous counter-protester with signs decrying ‘Big Government’ and ‘Socialism Sucks’ will later regret his ignorance that big government’s abuse comes mostly through its’ connections to the police state, the military industrial complex, and a bullying foreign policy. Maybe he was just standing around those posters because the internet reception was better.
With the idea that war is child abuse is on our minds, it will be remembered that when it was time for us to act, we were there, keeping alive that old American tradition that there’s no
such thing as a good war and a bad peace. At Northeastern, the police told us to move a few feet down the street. Though many of us were demoralized by this, all it indicates is that laws to prevent citizens from coming together to protest war and imperialism means we the peacemakers are in the majority.