Make Poetry, Not War - New York Times: "'This is all about you,' another called out. 'We don't care.'Tough crowd. McCain needs intervention. He has lost all sense of perspective in his race for the presidency, willing to whore himself out to the nearest speaking engagement until he is so tangled in his web of compromises that he slowly twists alone in the void, speechless.
A little while after the senator quoted Yeats about the fleeting nature of beauty, a student sarcastically called out, 'More poetry.'
First, Mr. McCain and the New School's president, Bob Kerrey, were slapped around by a student speaker, Jean Sara Rohe, a 21-year-old from Nutley, N.J., who sang a lyric from a peace song and then abandoned her original remarks to talk about the 'outrage' over Mr. McCain's speaking gig.
'The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded,' Ms. Rohe said, adding: 'I am young, and although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong.'
She continued: 'And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.'
The New School, of course, makes New York University seem like Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where Mr. McCain kowtowed last weekend to Jerry Falwell, the looney-toon he formerly deemed an agent of intolerance. (Just as Rudy buddy-buddied with Ralph Reed in Atlanta.)
The ultraliberal kids at the New School, the pacifist Greenwich Village university, think of themselves as free-thinking rabble-rousers in a world where many college kids, complacently cocooned under iPods, don't even like to debate, much less protest.
When a rigid-faced Mr. Kerrey chided the audience for being rude, a young woman yelled out, 'You're a war criminal!' And a guy chimed in, 'Yes, you are!'"
War is not popular, as politicians are about to find out.
Update: From the young lady herself.
Finally, Senator Mc Cain will tell us that we, those of us who are Americans, "have nothing to fear from each other." I agree strongly with this, but I take it one step further. We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet. Fear is the greatest impediment to the achievement of peace. We have nothing to fear from people who are different from us, from people who live in other countries, even from the people who run our government--and this we should have learned from our educations here. We can speak truth to power, we can allow our humanity always to come before our nationality, we can refuse to let fear invade our lives and to goad us on to destroy the lives of others. These words I speak do not reflect the arrogance of a young strong-headed woman, but belong to a line of great progressive thought, a history in which the founders of this institution play an important part. I speak today, even through my nervousness, out of a need to honor those voices that came before me, and I hope that we graduates can all strive to do the same.Bravo, well written and well said.
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