Liza Smith's blog

Beijing was plastered with Olympic fervor – billboards everywhere with the "One World One Dream" slogan, plants and flowers trimmed perfectly to represent the Olympic rings, gigantic athlete statues, big screens to watch the games and red banners wherever you turned that contained Chinese characters and their strangely translated propaganda-like sayings into English.

Conscientious Objection and Counter-Recruitment in the U.S.

All across the country, young people are standing up and saying “NO” to military recruiters in their high schools and on their college campuses. Communities are mobilizing to create alternative jobs and find positive opportunities outside of the military. Youth in the military and “civilian” youth are defining themselves as conscientious objectors – those who refuse to fight what they deem as unjust and unnecessary wars.

This fairy tale begins with a giant silver purse. Visualize that purse being carried in a taxi through Beijing. Oh no, it did not glow. Despite all the brightness inside, the purse perfectly contained the light we were about to unfurl.

But wait, let me back track, just for a moment.

On Sunday, during the 2008 Olympic games’ closing ceremonies, the Chinese government deported 10 Tibet supporters. By 8pm Sunday night these ten citizen journalists and activists were on their way home. They had been sentenced to 10 days of prison; six of them were held for over five days. 

Is it a nursery rhyme going through my head? Or just a saying? When I was little and we had spent a long evening out and about and were just pulling up to the front of our house, my mom would always say, “home again, home again, jiggity jig.”

That’s where I am now: back at my house in Oakland, California. After pulling a banner full of blue lights out of a silver bag at 11:30pm in front of the Olympic bird’s nest stadium in Beijing, getting arrested, being detained through the night in a smoky room, put on a 12 hour flight to New York city, waiting at the JFK airport for another 4, sitting through a flight to Oakland for 5 hours, waiting at the airport to be picked up, I finally arrived home at about 10:30pm last night. After 50 hours of no beds, no showers, lots of waiting, a bit of fear, excitement, not knowing what was next, boredom and exhiliration: here I am. Not sure what to do with myself. Not sure what to say.

This column I wrote was published in the East Bay Express on July 9, 2008.

Hurricane Katrina did it for Escenthio. At his high school in Oakland, he was enrolled in a JROTC program and was on his way to joining the military. But one of his teachers invited him to a benefit for the victims of the hurricane. It made Escenthio question his involvement in the class and our country's priorities in general. "Why are we over there killing people in Iraq when there are people in need right here?" he asked.

Soon afterward, he decided to organize a debate at his school around these issues, and invited the JROTC army officers to the table alongside Pablo Paredes, a well-known conscientious objector. The debates created quite a stir — and Escenthio became one of the central youth activists of BayPeace, an Oakland organization doing counter-recruitment work in high schools.

"He's one of the most amazing young activists I've met," said Susan from BayPeace, who recommended that Escenthio join our Youth Arts and Action delegation traveling to Colombia at the end of March. At eighteen, Escenthio had an important voice to bring: a young, African-American man finishing his last year of high school, a spoken-word artist, and counter-recruitment activist. I was quite excited about him joining us: a group of organizers, activists, artists, and young leaders who would travel to Colombia to meet up with two youth-based organizations working on the issues of conscientious objection and how militarism affects young people's lives.

After hours of waiting in the hot Santa Cruz, California city council room, listening to the impassioned arguments in favor and against off leash dog use at a nearby beach; and seeing a lengthy power point presentation on the plans for a new building in downtown Santa Cruz, we were losing our steam.

It seemed likely that our resolution, requesting that all US military aid to Colombia be re-directed to domestic drug prevention and rehabilitation programs, wouldn’t be considered until after 7pm when the council members returned from their evening recess.Fortunately Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty noticed that we had been patiently waiting all afternoon (thankfully we had all brought work with us: the UCSC Colombia research cluster grad students were grading papers and others worked on their laptops) and pushed our agenda item to the top of the list before the break. At 6pm, life-long activist Bert Muhly from 3 Americas took the floor.

The Berkeley City Council passed a resolution on Tuesday calling for an end to military funding of the Colombian Army as part of the “drug war,” and re-direction of money to domestic drug treatment efforts.

The city government urged Congresswoman Barbara Lee to “step up her leadership to terminate all military assistance to the Colombian Army, and to re-direct these funds” to “substance abuse prevention, harm reduction, and treatment programs.”

Last week in the printed version of Colombia’s second largest national newspaper El Espectador, an article was printed in the “People of the Year” section that applauded Colombia's Defense Minister for his counter-terrorism accomplishments, and went on to accuse the many organizations that do human rights work in Colombia of being manipulated by the FARC!

Read on to learn more about this dangerous and misleading statement, and read FOR's response which was signed by over twenty organizations.

The day before traveling to the School of the Americas protest in Ft. Benning, Georgia, I was at the copy shop to pick up the materials that I would take with me for Fellowship of Reconciliation's workshops and tabling efforts over the weekend. The guy behind the counter asked me what my name was. I answered, "Liza." And then he asked, "what does it mean?" After a pause, I said that it comes from the name Elizabeth, and that it was a historical name, and that... my explanation tailed off. He said, "ahhhh... no one knows the meaning of their name these days."

A few days later, after the workshops and tabling, after talking to people from many different parts of the country, after handing out hundreds of pieces of paper to those interested in FOR's work and campaigns, we spent the morning of Sunday, November 18th, hearing names. Name after name after name. Two hours of names. These were the names of those who had been killed in Latin America at the hands of SOA graduates. Thousands of names, spoken, sung and chanted. After every single name, we responded with the simple word in Spanish "presente."