More Antiwar Protests

The latest round of antiwar protests has centered on high school and college students. The photo below shows a group of high school students giving the peace sign.

I don’t know, maybe we’re getting old, but the attempt to evoke 60’s era activism seem pathetic. This one is of students at Hunter College. Note the “police state” button on the woman at the right. I think she means us, not Iraq. This was part of the “books not bombs” protest. It makes me wonder how much they know about the regimes they support. I don’t think Iraq is exactly the world’s center of free inquiry. This reminds me of one of the saddest articles I’ve ever read, in the Washington Post just after the liberation of Afghanistan. I posted on it at the time; maybe I’ll dredge it up and re-link to it if I can. The article was about a man who was arrested by the Taliban for owning books other than the Koran. He was imprisoned, and horribly tortured, for several years. Miraculously he survived, but he emerged brain-damaged and incontinent, and could walk only with difficulty. He was in his mid-twenties. At the end of the article, the man says: “I never want to see another book.” Books not bombs, indeed.