 Our next speaker, our penultimate speaker, works with youth specifically. And I wanna re-emphasize a point that I'm not sure has been made about 9-11 and that I know young people might still be asking like why it even happened or Osama bin Laden. We just really need to emphasize and help you all understand the kids that the first Iraq war, in the first Iraq war, we put bases in Saudi Arabia. And most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden, Saudi Arabian. He was radicalized by that event, you know, among other things, but by that event and vowed revenge. So, you know, without Iraq one, there wouldn't have been an Iraq two. And I know high schoolers, you listen at, I'm not gonna say ad nauseam, but for months and months and months, they cover World War I and World War II in such a bland way often. But without World War I, there wouldn't have been World War II. So the anti-war voices in the United States of America and around the world have been the correct voices all along. War begets war, not peace. So as you are listening to these months and months that you go through history class and hear war after war, that's pretty much all it's taught everyone in history class, FYI, really think with a critical eye and don't be afraid to use these resources you've learned today and raise your hand and do alternative research papers and things like that, bring it into your classroom. So with that said, our next speaker is, excuse me, I lost my paper, Rick Jankow. And Rick Jankow works with the national network opposing the militarization of youth or NOMI. And they oppose the growing intrusion of the military into young people's lives all around the United States. And thank you so much, Rick. You're on. I just discovered that for some reason, my camera is not facing the right way. Instead of facing me, it's facing my desktop. So I need to get that fixed. But I'm gonna get started anyway while I at the same time I multitask here. I've heard a lot of really important questions asked, but not until the tail end of this webinar. And that concerns me greatly. Because I think these are questions that should be discussed and debated and critiqued by every one of the groups that's present or represented here. And they're not, it's not happening. I don't see it. Questions like, why was the anti-war movement unable to stop the invasions? Why have we come full circle after 20 years? I would say, why after 60 years? Because I, my generation was part of the movements of the 60s. And we thought revolution had actually been achieved. But obviously it hadn't. So it's really concerning to me that, and I'm still working on this, I'm sorry, this video problem. It's really concerning to me that people haven't stopped they're organizing long enough to critique themselves and critique their focus and their direction. And instead we follow the same pattern that basically protest movements have followed in the United States for generations, which is we focus on the crises and then we react. We try to put out fires that are handed to us instead of trying to deny fuel for any fires. And that's where education and the school system is the most important factor because what I learned looking back at this in a critical way over the last 35 years that I've been working with schools and in schools and with young people is that people don't think so much about where behavior comes from. They just think about the behavior. And the reality is that the other side the corporations, the military, conservative organizations they do think about that and they act on it. And you will find them in the school system in many ways. You won't find very many progressive groups that are represented here in the school system. And that's a major, major error, a mistake because it's all about planting seeds. If you don't plant the right seeds when people are captive audience for 13, 14 years five days a week, seven or eight hours a day, nine months of the year, the other side is planting their seeds and they're planting seeds for weeds. That's the reality. And so it's, to me, it is paramount that more progressive organizations organizations with progressive goals reevaluate their direction and find some way to prioritize at least some work focused on the school system particularly the K through 12 system. Academic study and research and writing and all is very important and valuable because it helps us with resources but it's the K through 12 system where the seeds are planted or the kind of wars that we have been having. And we have to learn. We have to learn from the military. The military, they're not random about what they do. They pay very expensive companies to advise them on marketing and marketing strategy. We need to do the same thing. We don't have the money to pay for those companies but we can strategize and we can ask critical questions like the ones that some of us have mentioned here toward the end of the webinar. So, I mean, I was asked originally to come on to this to talk about, for example, and I'm gonna try to do this about recruiting in schools and what impact 9-11 had on recruiting. Well, okay, you'll see headlines like these today. Trying to make it seem as though 9-11 spurred this patriotic response and that people were recruiting like crazy or enlisting like crazy. Well, in fact, it's not true. It's not true. That's not really what happened. And for a year or two, yes, there was a temporary increase in interest in the military among young people but it wasn't because of 9-11 so much it had more to do with the economy. And this is something that I've tried to educate people about because they like to think, oh, it's counter recruiters who are forcing the enlistment rates down or war and it isn't. It's a combination of those factors but primarily the economy. So you see here, I'm just showing this because it really graphically illustrates my point when the blue lines go up, unemployment goes up and so do the enlistments of what the military, what the army calls high quality enlistees. When unemployment goes down, they have more difficulty and that happened. If you look at 2002 and 2003, you see that temporary surge of enlistments but then in 2005, the army fell 7,000 short of their 80,000 enlistment goal. And it didn't really change for them until unemployment rose again. And that is really what drives enlistments more than anything else. So I want people to understand that because they may think, oh, war does that, it doesn't. I would like to think it did but when people are forced because of their socioeconomic status to make a hard decision like agreeing to join the military and become an infantryman and go out and risk their lives, they're doing it because of desperation. And there's no way that they're just going to ignore that and recruiters understand it. So what I'm getting at here is that we really have to, we have to think more about what goes on in the school system, not make assumptions. Really, here's the danger of what's going on in the school system. And this relates back to what I was saying about, where should we be focusing our time and our energy? In 3,400 high schools, there are ROTC units. And the combined number of students who on any given school day sit in a military indoctrination class is over half a million. Okay, and many of them are also offered in school marksmanship training. Think about that, over half a million students and they don't just absorb JROTC propaganda and that's it and it stays while they're in the class. They go into other classes and they take it with them. And it also follows them into adulthood. Now you go, okay, there are many more high school students than half a million. Well, here's the deal. Right now, they're trying to solidify proposals to greatly expand the JROTC program. And one proposal is to increase it to 6,000 schools. So then you're gonna have a million or more students in that program. And while that's happening, these are the kind of lessons they're being taught. This is the results of a review that we did last year and some of the conclusions we had, which is those textbooks show racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes. There's anti-Muslim propaganda, there's whitewashing of our wars. But the most important concern that I have from what I read was that constantly that program tries to teach young people that military values and codes of conduct are present or presented in a way that they should want it for civilian society. That's what they're convinced of when they walk out of their JROTC classes. Think about that. We have a half a million students going through that system coming out and they've been taught that military values and codes of conduct are appropriate for civilian society. And we wanna ask ourselves, how does it we come full circle and have the same struggles today? Well, this is the answer. It's what goes on in those of you who are teachers, including Rachel and probably a few others in this webinar, understand this. And that is the thing that I feel we should be talking about. That's the kind of critique that we should be talking about. So I do have a list of links. These are resources that people can use if they decide, yes, I wanna do something about this. I do wanna address this problem in K through 12 schools. These are links to resources. And I pasted them in the chat earlier, but I'm assuming they'll also be here in the recording and I can paste them in again. But this is a practical way for groups to get involved. And I'm not saying you have to drop everything else you're doing, but I'm saying groups like Code Pink and Peace Action and a variety of other organizations, they're doing valuable work in agitating for more progressive change. They should look at how they can maybe shave off some of their attention, some of their resources to focus on this. And that's pretty much all I have to say. And thank you very much for giving me a chance to share this information. Thank you so much, Rick, for posing those critical questions and for reminding us just how deeply embedded militarism is within our schools.