"There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part,...And you've got to put your bodies on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop."
- Mario Savio, Berkeley, 1964
If you try googling various combinations of "three students arrested" "City College," CCNY and similar things, you'll wind up with a whole history of student activism, but not news of the recent arrests at City.
To learn more about why three students were arrested for protesting military recruiters on campus, and how it is that they came to be charged with assaulting the police, you must go to:Indymedia, which will send you to a story on an indymedia blog dedicated to activism against military recruitment called: Counter Recruiter. The same site also has information about how to support Tom Keenan, who was arrested for handing out anti-recruitment fliers at William Patterson University in New Jersey.
The students are also struggling over the college president's assertion that if protests occur on campus, they must do so in "pens" as a condition of "free assembly." Keep your eyes peeled; Atty. Ron McGuire has (perhaps hyperbolically, perhaps not) compared the coming protest to Berkeley's free speech movement of 1964. Regardless, the number of arrests made of people for simple speech acts should be increasingly difficult for all of us to either ignore or accept.
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