Peace Club Report Millikan High School
Eduardo Perez / Vice President -
The peace club at Millikan High School in Long Beach, CA, is one of many high school clubs here on our campus. We meet up every Monday during lunch in Ms. Gombrich’s room and we discuss and organize peace activities. Our school is lucky to have a Peace Academy of over 600 students who have chosen to focus on peace studies under the leadership of Ms. Gombrich.
So far, we planned and participated in the Veterans Day and the Martin Luther King Day Parades. These activities were fun and showed me that the task creating activities and spreading the word of peace is not that hard. A lot of people on campus assisted us and supported our cause. Even though we are a new club and small, we have made plans for the rest of the year that we hope will get
noticed around the whole school, like the Teen Memorial. We will put up memorial markers with the names and faces of the over 500 teenager that are the casualties from in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This display points out
what it really means to enlist in the military today. Many people don’t even know why we are at war anymore and not knowing makes it easier to sell the war as a solution for the problems in the USA.
The amount of hype military recruiters give to high school students is unrealistic. They never mention what limits there are to benefits they say you may not get if you enlist. This is one of the many reasons why we want to get the word out about military enlistment on our campus here. We also want to show the film “Before You Enlist” on campus and have a campus wide meditation event. We know this will not stop everyone from enlisting but will at least it will let them know what’s up if they do.
We would like to have a peace club on campus next year, but since all of our club officers are seniors, we are working to get students to peace camp this summer, and I hope to be a peace camp recruiter for peace-not war! We have also been invited to to record a radio show at peace camp and air it on a new station KLBP so we can learn another way to get our message of peace out to the public. We would like to give students a better view of what a peace club is all about. In September I plan attend Long Beach City College and am very interested in creative writing and poetry. While I don’t exactly have a political message in my poetry, I do try to find my inner peace through poetry. Hope to see you in person, or for you to hear us at peace camp on the radio this summer!
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