Please consider visiting http://www.draftresistance.org.

It's a site dedicated to shattering the myths surrounding the selective slavery system and building mass civil disobedience to stop the draft before it starts.

When it comes to the draft, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

On the November 2 Student Walk-out

Two and a half years after the American invasion of Iraq, it is time to take stock. More than 2,000 US soldiers have been killed, more than 15,200 wounded, and countless more will suffer the psychological consequences of the war, including an unreported number of suicides among discharged soldiers.

Iraqi deaths are more difficult to estimate. However, it is likely that somewhere between 35,700 and 72,100 Iraqi civilians, if not more, have died in the violence unleashed by the American invasion and the subsequent civil disorder (www.brookings.edu/iraqindex).(1) This means that for every US serviceman who has lost his or her life in Iraq, twenty or thirty noncombatant Iraqis — men, women, and children — have lost their lives. (There are, to our knowledge, no estimates of the number of Iraqi's wounded or traumatized.) Despite the presence of 152,000 US troops, a level of commitment that has held fairly constant throughout the occupation, Iraq now serves as a combat zone for external jihadist groups. A civil war, pitting large numbers of Iraqi insurgents against the new government, is now in progress and the sectarian split in the results of the recent referendum on the new Iraqi constitution suggests that the legitimacy of the new regime will continue to be violently contested.

To find a story by Jane Collins, a frequent participant in the Harvard-Cambridge Walk for Peace, on the September 24, 2005, antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., please find To Wake a Sleeping Giant at http://www.janecollins.org.

By Jane Collins

Gentle spirits, sisters and brothers of the dream,
keepers of the light of loving-kindness, you who are
soft-hearted, open-minded, amazed to be here,
whom this world fills with delight and horror,
living hearts, tender spirits
I conjure thee, I seek thee, I implore thee
Arise, awake, shake off despair, remember
how many times has the Mysterious entered our lives,
how many times have we felt and seen the rush of great
winds around and through us
Remember how little we know ourselves, and take comfort
Remember from what vast sources loving springs,
and seek ye one another.

More is happening than we see on the six o’clock news.
They haven’t pinned it down, this slippery Tao. No one
owns it, no one controls it, but something big is
happening and it happens in small ways
(every wall you break) (every mind you shake)
Come out, come out, wherever you are
Remember the waves of hope that lifted our hearts above the
bloody tides of other days, remember when you think that
evil has won, how many hearts refuse it
Or will you believe those who say we do not exist?
Be of good courage, rejoice, lift up your voices, call out

Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard University, read this poem by Wilfred Owen in the presence of dozens of university students, faculty, and staff, as well as many members of the Cambridge community, at our first anniversary gathering of the Harvard-Cambridge Walk for Peace on May 18, 2005, in Harvard Yard.

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,

By Jane Collins

What if you wake up one morning
and peace is outside your window
walking, speaking, running
like a river,
what will you do?
Will you go out and kiss its feet,
which are working feet,
will you stand and watch
or will you join it
in your own time, like a duck
meeting other ducks in a river

What if you wake up one morning
and peace is inside your heart
Will you call the papers
Will you have a cigarette
How will you say hello to
the first person you see

What if you wake up one morning
and war is outside your window
hurting and killing the way it does,
racing like a forest fire,
what will you do?
Will you join it like
a stick of kindling
Will you watch
like the eye of a potato
Will you get dressed and
go to work with
peace in your heart
like a duck
meeting other ducks in the river