BY DAVID BACON
SACRAMENTO — In 1968, bombs dropped over Vietnam exploded in US cities. Poverty and inequality combined with war to set cities alight. Today, young people's shrinking possibilities for a future other than military service after high school may spark a similar wave of urban anger.
Yawning financial craters have opened on the campuses of community colleges across California, resulting in cancelled classes, laid-off teachers and the end of programs that made it possible for working-class youth to find an education after high school. Rising unemployment makes it doubtful that even those who make it through two years of community college will find a job on the other side.
That likelihood brought thousands of the state's young people to Sacramento in late March to fight for their education. Buses carrying students from around California pulled up outside Sacramento's Raley Field.
As the fifth day of the Iraq invasion played out across the country's television screens, 20,000 young people and their teachers set off down the capitol mall. With banners unfurled, shouts of "Books not bombs!" travelled in waves up and down the line of marchers. They came with a message for the governor and state legislators. "Unless these budget cuts are stopped", Maria Reyes from Oxnard said simply, "students like me are not going to be able to continue going to school".
The immediate crisis confronting students is the California governor's decision to target the community college system for deep funding cuts, as he seeks to close a US$34 billion dollar deficit. "In my school we're losing 200 classes this semester alone", said Dayna Johnson, a student from El Camino College. "Now they're saying we may not have summer session at all."
Sign after sign, banner after banner, condemned the cost at home of the war abroad. "What the federal government is spending on the war in one day could save the education of all of us", Johnson declared angrily.
That anger is directed as much at Congress as it is at the state government. While a national recession has turned California's past budget surpluses into a deficit, no help is on the way from Washington. Instead, in early April, President George Bush demanded and got $78 billion to fight the Iraq war. Democrats in Congress fought to include more money for police and the domestic cost of "homeland security". But neither they nor the Republicans introduced a bill to save California's community colleges.
A bipartisan mantra of national security trumps education, especially for the kids of working-class families. "The war on terror", said one sign, "is a war on us".
Governor Grey Davis' proposes cuts to programs designed to retain at-risk students, which will affect the poorest especially students of colour — who attend community colleges in far higher percentages than at the University of California or in the state university system.
The governor plans to increase student fees from $11 to $24 per unit, a 118% hike. Marty Hittelman, a teacher at Los Angeles Community College and head of the state's union council for community college faculty, points out that for every $1 increase in per unit tuition, community colleges lose 1% of their students. The total fee increase, therefore, will shove more than 200,000 young people out of the system, more than the combined student population of all the campuses of the University of California.
In an irony not lost on the Sacramento marchers, Congress last year granted military recruiters access to every high school student in the country. Graduates will find it easier to go to war than go to school. Most US soldiers in Iraq are the same age as the young people who massed in front of the California state capitol. They too have dreams — of coming home and going to school, making something of their lives. They'll find it harder than it was before the war.
Meanwhile, the chances that vets will find post-war jobs are plummeting. In the first week of war, 445,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits.
The Sacramento march points to a new political reality. Social movements coalescing around issues seemingly unrelated to war, like education, quickly find a connection to it. The annual parades around California, for instance, commemorating the birth of farm worker leader Cesar Chavez also became anti-war protests, when hundreds of marchers in San Francisco and Los Angeles carried signs in Spanish opposing the Iraq invasion.
The link is economic — the US is no longer rich enough to afford guns and butter both. One teacher from Morgan Hill, Chris Mink, explained her participation in a San Francisco anti-war march by saying, "If we aren't vocal everyone will assume we're going along. We have enough to do here at home, instead of putting a war in Iraq in front of the wellbeing of our kids."
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.