Audio Activism

When I was about to go to college I needed financial help to do so. My parents contributed very little. I worked summers but the savings just didn’t cut it. So I applied for loans. One of the requirements to receive loans was that I had to register for selective service. This helped the US Government keep track of me. I told them who I was, how old I was, where I lived, and that I was eligible for the draft. Fortunately, I was never drafted. Unfortunately, in American history, we’ve had drafts and lots of young men and women have died.

Now many years later I’m stuck with a TON of financial debt (mostly because of high interest rates). I’ve helped banks make a lot of money. Now I wish I had the foresight in high school to tell the US Government to go to hell and find the money for college elsewhere.

Today high school students have a much more dangerous system to deal with. The so-called “No Child Left Behind Act” [double speak] forces high schools that are receiving college money to report all of this private data about their students. [You give us money we give you fresh bodies to fight and die!] The Washington Post recently reported that the Pentagon is contracting with a company to create a database to aggregate all this info about American children. With modern computers and relational databases it’ll be easy to run reports and create strategies for recruitment and potentially a new draft. Telemarketing, harassment, direct mail, threats, manipulation, bribing, etc. etc.

I just ran across the site MilitaryFreezone.org with a form for high school students to Opt Out of this system of data collection. Students can sign this form with their parents if they are under eighteen or with out if they are over. Here is the meat of the matter:

“Federal public law 107-110, section 9528 of the ESEA, “No Child Left Behind Act” requires school districts to release student names, addresses, and phone numbers to military recruiters upon their request. Students are then called at home by recruiters and pressured to join the military. The law also requires the school district to notify you of your right to Opt-Out from this by requesting that the district not release your information to military recruiters. The completion and return of this form serves as your request to withhold your private information.”

Here is a pdf of the entire form to print out and sign.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Activism, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.