March 20, 2004 millions of people from around the world protested against the US/UK occupation of Iraq and the continued Bush administration policy of unilateralism and preemptive war. The protest marked the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and brought over one million protestors nationwide. In Eureka, a small town in Northern California, 3,000 marched for peace and justice. This speech was delivered there by high school student and YCL member Shane Brinton.
Friends and comrades,
While my oration today is certainly for all of you, it has been specially tailored for, and is directed toward, the young people in the audience: those of you under the age of 30, and chiefly toward those of you who are, like myself, under the age of 18.
You see, we have a large and distinct role to play within the peace movement, because it is our future that is at stake. It is our future, not George Bush’s, not Dick Cheney’s, not Donald Rumsfeld’s! Ours! We own the rights to it. Unfortunately, many of us don’t exactly understand this.
MTV, mainstream radio, fashion magazines - they tell us what to wear, eat, listen to, watch, think. They dictate the terms and conditions of our every move: of our very existence. We sign our future over to them on a daily basis. And they sign our future over to other corporations who in turn sign our future over to others, and they to others, until eventually Enron, Bechtel, and Halliburton own our future: social conformity, xenophobia, and war own our future.
But the ownership they have is merely a phony document, an insignificant piece of paper. It is a form of ownership identical to that which our nation and most of the world know so well. A corporate CEO will claim that he is the master of his company, that he has the right to dictate the course it will take within the economic world. But the CEO doesn’t really do anything. It is his employees, the rank and file workers, who actually produce the products and provide the services that the CEO profits from. In actuality, the workers don’t need the CEO. They could, with some adjustments, keep the business running without him. On the other hand, a CEO without workers is a CEO without a job. The same can be said for the relationship between the corporate war machine and the vast majority of Americans.
As young people we are constantly being bombarded with corporate and military propaganda telling us exactly what we need to do in order to be good little patriots—and now, there is even a bill that is designed to reinstate the draft, and extend it to young women. But does any of this actually stem from a genuine love for this nation? From a desire to protect the American people? The answer is obviously: NO. NO! NO! It is all a sham. The plan is to keep youth half-witted and quiet—to keep us consuming their excuse for culture and marching off to fight for corporate interests abroad.
But they can’t do it without us, because we actually do own the future. Their wars depend upon us, on our willingness to fight and die for oil and land. If we say no, they say draft, but if they say draft, we say no! If we can unite like that, like we have started to do, they will have no way to get around us, because that is real power.
Much like workers who have the ability to run their workplace without high-paid managers or a CEO, we have the ability to create youth culture, music, and fashion without corporations. We can defend our nation and our communities from violence and terrorism without going overseas to kill and be killed. But we can only do it by way of an incessant struggle: through a persistent and unremitting effort to assert and defend our rights via self-education, direct action, and, for those of you of voting age, the ballot box.
Our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents... they are the people who built and improved upon this nation. It wasn’t military generals or politicians, and it certainly wasn’t the corporations that our family members have labored and toiled under. It is their labor itself, and their most revolutionary actions, that have driven this nation onward and won civil rights, labor union rights, women’s rights, and a plethora of other things. Now it is our labor that will vanquish this corporate war machine from the face of the planet!
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