:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 11.11.2004 ::
:: Vets for Peace ::
Principal apologizes for speakers at Veterans Day assembly
BELLINGHAM (AP) — Two members of Veterans for Peace got a standing ovation when they addressed a high-school Veterans Day assembly, but their appearance prompted a letter of apology from the principal.
Sehome High School officials received some complaints that yesterday's event was too one-sided, principal Jim Kistner said. He told The Bellingham Herald that staff members had said that graphic descriptions of war had upset a number of students.
"I want to apologize for making any student or staff member uncomfortable because the presentation at Sehome's Veterans Day Assembly today was used to advance a particular political agenda," Kistner wrote in the letter distributed to students.
"Our community speakers had agreed that this assembly would honor our veterans. We deeply regret that they did not."
"I completely disagree with that last statement," Marshall Petryni, 17, a student organizer of the assembly, said in a telephone interview today with The Associated Press.
"A bunch of kids came up to me after — some were crying, some gave me hugs," Petryni said.
One of the speakers, Mark Polin, who served in the Navy from 1979 to 1997, told the gathering of nearly 1,000 students that Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day — commemorating an end to war.
In a telephone interview today from his Bellingham home, Polin said he was at the assembly "to honor the warrior and not the war. The way to honor veterans is to not keep repeating the same mistakes and sending young men and women to their deaths."
Army veteran Ben Sherman, author of "Medic: The Story of a Conscientious Objector in the Vietnam War," described war casualties in detail to the students and unfurled a scroll with the names of the more than 1,100 U.S. troops killed so far in Iraq.
They were introduced to the audience by Dr. Bob Olson of Bellevue, a World War II veteran who founded the Bellingham chapter of Veterans for Peace, Sherman said, noting that three generations of veterans were represented.
"We weren't there to tell them to believe one way or another," he said today his Mercer Island home. "We were there to say, 'Here's the cost. Maybe your generation will find ways it won't cost that much.' Any veteran who's been in a war will tell you there has to be a better way to solve our problems than this."
The men received standing ovations, and students gathered afterward to shake their hands.
"It wasn't your normal Veterans Day ceremony," Sherman said, adding, "If he'd had three generals talk about how wonderfully we're doing in Iraq ... would he then write a letter to parents about how only one side of the story was told? That side is always told."
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 10:44:00 PM [+] ::
...
