This is Not My War

pstrongA Low income youth of color responds to the Call For War!? /strong/p pDIV align="left" TABLE cellpadding="5"TR VALIGN="TOP"TDIMG SRC= "../sites/default/files/arch_img/482/photo_1_feature.jpg" //td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TD/td/trTR VALIGN="TOP"TDTR VALIGN="TOP"TD pby Staff Writer/p piPNN contributor Lawrence Ashton is an intern in the Youth in the Media Program at POOR Magazine, a media and multi-media training program for low income youth in the Bay Area/i /p pI didn’t show up for me - even though it would be me that would be affected - I didn’t wake up early on a Saturday morning for me even though it was me that was missing my extra non-school day sleep - I didn’t march for me even though it was me that had to miss my basketball practice that day... no, I was at 24th and Mission streets on a Saturday morning at 11:00 am for This is Not Our War! a Youth and Community Speakbr / Out!! March and Rally.... for my father./p pMy father left our home a long time ago with his nightmare screams, his cold sweats, his heroin addiction and.... his shopping cart. /p pBefore he completely stopped talking my father used to visit my mother and me and whisper “ ..no matter what”, and he would always stop in the middle of his sentence and look away cause he didn’t want me to see the tears puddling in his eyes and then continue, .. “please don’t ever... no matter what, don’t let another war happen without speaking up!!...” he always punctuated his comment with a short laugh as though he hadn’t really begged me to do something so huge - so impossible- so important. /p pMy father was a soldier in vietnam, involved in a war he never understood - fighting against an enemy he never knew, for a country who had already treated him with contempt because of the color of his skin. He had lived in the south and was barely out of school - and right before he was shipped off to be the human bullit in some else’s gun, he fell in love with a girl - he fathered a son, (my brother) he had a dream of going to college, or at least, of getting out of the South. Within weeks of getting drafted he was sent very faraway, to a small city in Vietnam. Sometimes he would mumble the name but most of the time he would say he couldn’t pronounce the name of the place - and he didn’t want to cause he wouldn’t be doing that beautiful language any justice- and that would be disrespectful of another person’s culture./p pMaybe some folks could have seen the killing that my father saw and still come out of it ok, maybe some folks could have felt the terror my father felt and been ok but my father was sensitive, young and already kind of unstable due to his already broken apart life - heroin easily slipped into his veins , like a warm blanket of something over his terrified soul- and for a short minute he had some peace in that strange place. /p pSo on Saturday morning I listened to speakers from Loco Bloco, Company of Profits and other community based organizations speak out about how they aren’t being represented in this onslaught of Bush-Loving media coverage that accepts everything the Bush Government says as though it is the holy sacrament. About how they are not willing to go to war and how this is NOT OUR WAR! /p pAs low income youth and youth of color we are not being represented in this country. I, for one am very sorry about what happened in New York, I am very sorry for the families and the folks who died on that day, and it must not happen again, but the answer is not to start shooting at some vague enemy and in the process take out entire cities filled with schools, filled with children and families, adults and elders. /p pAs we set out on the march I let the voices of resistance wash over my body - hoping, praying, that if my father has managed to survive the battle of homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse, he knows that I am taking his pleas seriously and that I know that this is not now, nor has ever been OUR WAR!!br / /p/td/tr/td/tr/table/div/p