“THE 17-YEAR-OLD” ASSERTS HERSELF: Yesterday,

“THE 17-YEAR-OLD” ASSERTS HERSELF: Yesterday, she was on my case again. “Mom, why do you call me that? It’s so demeaning!”
I tried to explain it was related to an old joke. But that it was too complex to explain.
She carried on. “Besides, in your March 1 post, you talked about the dog having a slipped disk before you said anything about the so-called ‘seventeen-year-old’ having a bad injury. What’s up with that?”
Okay, mea culpa. I’m really, really sorry. So folks let me introduce you to: Ms. Lorna Quandt! What’s more, Lorna’s not just any 17-year-old but a talented young woman who with a bunch of her friends from Charlottesville High School today organized a walkout by 250 students in protest against the war. Read all about it (with pictures!) on George Loper’s website. George is a great community activist here in Charlottesville, VA, who has really enriched community life by using his site as a sort of public bulletin board for discussions and news of what’s going on around town.
The CHS students did a fabulous job of organizing their action; and they did it all on their own. And the school administration and the local police were both also quietly cooperative of the school students getting to exercise their right of free speech…
Two hundred fifty students is around 25 percent of the school’s student body. When the demonstrators got on the local t.v. news tonight, the ones who were interviewed were all stunningly articulate. And they really spoke from their hearts. The school should be– probably is– very proud of them.
These are kids, of course, who– if the war and/or the state of occupation drag on for any length of time– may well be subject to the draft. The young men among them, that is. But I think they all already know some recently graduated high schoolers who got lured into the military by recruiters who promised them that was the way to get job training, or learn computers, or whatever. So the whole business of the war has a scary immediacy for the high schoolers that it may not have for many of us older folks.
Our city only has one high school, which therefore takes in kids from nearly the whole demographic of the city’s population. The University of Virginia, which is located here, has a student body that, by and large, comes from a much narrower (= higher-income, more upper-middle-class) demographic. The level of antiwar activism in the high school seems MUCH higher than that among the U.Va. students! In this country, in general, relatively fewer young people from higher-income families than from lower-income families volunteer for the armed forces– since they have so many other options in life. So maybe the difference in activism levels we see among the young people in our city is related to the level of social/economic privilege that many U.Va. students enjoy, and to their relatively greater isolation from from knowing many people who actually serve in the military.
I guess it was the new Oscar winner Mike Moore who noted, in his recent letter to President Bush, that only one serving member of the U.S. Congress has a son or daughter in the armed forces. (MM suggested, too, that Bush should maybe send his own daughters over to join the fray.)