Washington D.C. Youth Against War

D.C. Area Students for Peace

February 19, 2003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Lily Hughes-Dunn at (301) 270-2659
or e-mail Beck Levy at smsherruby@aol.com
(individual school contacts follow release)

D.C. Area Students for Peace Stage
Multi-High School Walkout
to Protest War on Iraq

(Washington D.C.)- On Friday, February 21, 2003, students from over ten D.C. area high schools will be walking out of classes to protest the potential war on Iraq. Students from Sidwell Friends, Edmund Burke, Bethesda Chevy Chase, School Without Walls, Woodrow Wilson, Dunbar, Georgetown Day School, Blair and others, will leave their buildings at approximately 11:30 am, to gather and rally at Dupont Circle at 12:00 pm. At 1:30 pm the group will march from Dupont Circle to the Capitol, where they will be joined by more student and school groups, and other D.C. residents and will conduct a peaceful demonstration, starting at 3:00 pm, with student speakers and performances.
This event is completely student organized and facilitated. Many students are risking suspension or expulsion from school, or even arrest for truancy; however they are willing to persist and participate in this protest against the war, despite the consequences. “Being suspended from school is insignificant compared to the death and destruction that Mr. Bush’s long and harrowing war will wreak,” says Beck Levy, a junior at B.C.C.
As D.C. area students, we are quickly approaching both voting and enlistment age. We are the generation upon whom the responsibility for rebuilding the country will fall. Our public resources, already deficient, will be drastically depleted if our country follows through with this unprovoked and unilateral military action against Iraq.
Thus we are protesting for the following reasons:
• American military unilateralism will only decrease national security.
• Resources wasted on Bush’s exorbitantly expensive war are desperately needed in education for nation’s youth and other domestic services such as healthcare, public housing, and social security.
• It is our friends, families, and we who will be or already have been enlisted to fight and die in Bush’s war. This is partially due to section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind act, which releases personal information and subjects students to harassment from military recruiters.
• We believe that violence and war upon humanity is a self-destructive cycle that must be halted.
• We demand that our voices be heard in calling attention to these threatening effects of a potential war with Iraq.
To prevent this unnecessary war and the unjust deaths of U.S and Iraqi people, as well as the destruction of their nation and the depletion of ours, we also demand:
-That U.S. imposed sanctions on Iraq be lifted.
-That current bombings enacted by the U.S. government on Iraq must cease.
-That war with Iraq must not take place now or in the near future.