A student view of the protest

Commentary by Tony Perez-Carpenter

The FSU Center for Participant Education sponsored a caravan of six cars and a van holding close to 30 students and local activists to Fort Benning for the School of the Americas (SOA) protest. We had a blast! The energy grew all weekend and really made an impact on our group.

At first some of us were put off by the amount of vendors. The $15 T-shirts and copious consumption upset the vehement anti-capitalists. The conflict needs to be talked about in the movement, but I feel that excluding the vendors is impractical and unfair. They’re good people, and most represented right-on groups such as Bridges Across Boarders, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), and the Beehive Collective.

By afternoon, everyone in our group got caught up in the protest’s energy.

Saturday night, there were workshops held at the Columbus Convention Center. One notable presentation was the CIW talking about how the boycott that they led caused Taco Bell to pay more in wages to migrant farmworkers. The CIW also described their current campaign that is designed to force McDonald’s to improve payments and safety conditions for the workers.

Since young people constitute the majority of the fast food consumers, we have an obligation to tell McDonald’s we won’t buy from their restaurants as long as these injustices continue. This spring we will be working on the campaign in Tallahassee to bring down the clown. Many students went to an anti-authoritarian caucus, and some attended a talk by an indigenous woman from Bolivia. Her talk about women’s oppression and how all these struggles are connected really hit home with me. We must fight for each other and stand up against these corporate bullies.

At Sunday’s protest at the SOA gates, big puppets, street theater, and drum brigades made the festival of resistance come alive and surpass last year’s rainy, quiet vigil. At the end of the parade, the drums kept sounding and we danced in the street: old nuns and young radicals together chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! The SOA has got to go!”

This trip concluded CPE’s globalization series. This spring we will be working on a few campaigns such as the fair food campaign with CIW, and we plan to bring in speakers such as Native American activist Sherman Alexi and progressive political analyst Michael Parenti.

For more information about CPE, and for updates on upcoming events, check out www.yourfreeuniversity.org.

Tony Perez-Carpenter is a member of the Center for Participant Education collective.