SDS students at Macalester protest military recruiting

Melanie Raydo, a student at Macalester College and member of Macalester Peace and Justice Committee/Students for a Democratic Society (MPJC/SDS), locked herself to the door of the Army and Navy Recruitment station on Washington Avenue on the University of Minnesota campus Thursday, April 23. Four other students joined her in the lock down of recruitment stations around the university.  They all left voluntarily at 4:30 p.m.

They issued the following statement: “Today, as members of Macalester Peace and Justice Committee-Students for a Democratic Society, we are locking down and placing our bodies in direct opposition to U.S. military recruitment practices and to the perpetuation of imperialist, profit-driven violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and throughout the Middle East. The increase in troops in Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq indicates to us that the Obama administration is continuing a pattern of intense militarism and occupation.

Each day, recruitment off-ices send young people from our community to the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost of enlistment is great: over 4,500 of those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed, 150,000 have been seriously injured, and more than 300,000 suffer PTSD. Furthermore, 3 out of every 10 women serving in the military have been raped, and even
more have been sexually assaulted while serving. Military recruitment targets low-income youth by promising education and jobs—but these promises rarely are fully honored. We refuse to allow this racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist system to continue recruiting new members uninterrupted.

“In locking down, we intend to interrupt ‘business as usual’ at this station. We reject the institutions of recruitment that prey upon our communities, and we reject U.S. sponsored state violence in the Middle East. As long as the United States continues this imperialist project, destroying lives and denying self-determination to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, we will continue to oppose this system directly, by any means possible. We act in support of and in solidarity with yesterday’s ‘Zero Recruitment Day,’ organized by the Anti-War Comm-ittee, and strive to continue that project by fighting for zero recruitment, everyday.”