Students Get It. #HereUsNow Statement @Ohio Obama HQ

In Ohio students are on the march (livestream link) chanting “When education is under attack, what do we do? Stand UP fight BACK!” at the president's campaign headquarters in big swing state Ohio. Right cozy up next to Illinois, as in Chicago, as in big buck$ available to help with staffing the white house.

#HereUsNow's statement is a comprehensive embrace of problems related to the rapidly retreating dream of higher education accessible to everyone. Not just rich people's kids.

Environmental risks + economic exploitation + militarization on behalf of the 1% + equality for ALL = Included. Nice.

“You can preach economic growth all day but there are no jobs on a dying planet." Tabitha Skervin, Michigan State University

Bill McKibben could take a leaf from their journal. His "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math" in Rolling Stone earlier this hot, hot summer was a great focus on global warming/carbon's defining numbers, and on identifying an enemy for the purposes of movement building. It's the petroleum companies (not the banks who bankroll them, bet on them, and manipulate their share value, or the government officials that allow it.)

McKibben's reductionist approach makes for clear communication, but it seems to ignore a couple of elephants in the room: how petroleum companies use military spending to keep demand for their product high while scrambling after more of it, and of how much that adds to CO2, as well as how that affects our governance abilities here in the self-styled experiment in democracy.

When I'm working against war and militarization, I feel like I'm resisting the bulldozing of olive trees in occupied Palestine, and D.U. contamination all over Eurasia, and the gutting of education and other social programs to pay for continuing to degrade our natural environment, planet Earth. (And don't even get me started on the takeover of what paltry school funding there is by more and more corporate recipients under the No Child Left Behind Act, which Obama has continued to renew. And whether that generation will receive its notions from the market of free thought, or the market of selling to children.)

It's all connected. Thank the goddess for bright students interested in connecting the dots, and standing up and fighting back on behalf of humanity.

Source: Pictures of Afghanistan, photo by Teddy Wade