Day 2 of the Student “Definite Detention” Sit-Out
Posted by stoptorture on April 26th, 2007
The sun helped us out aplenty today by giving us more passers-by. We collected about 100 letters to Congress! Got ourselves a bit of campus coverage too.
Also today, a hint of hope…U.S. senators vow to restore rights to detainees.
Quote of the day goes to a 3rd grader on a field trip. After being explained what Guantánamo is, and how they treat people there, he shook his head saying, “Someone should build a time machine and go back in time and bring Harriet Tubman back to us. We need her now.”
Photo of the day
April 29th, 2007 at 8:26 am
You people are pathetic. How rude… how tasteless. Afraid to actually attritute your comments… covering your faces just like the Al Qaida terrorists. What cowards. Of course you’d have to hide your identity since it’d harm your employment prospects to have it known. Oh, wait, you won’t be employed… you’ll probably perform some useless “community activist” role.
April 29th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Every single student who sat hooded in orange would have been proud to announce his or her identity to anyone passing by. Fearful people do not volunteer to wear a black hood in public. At the beginning and the end of each shift, as the person donned the hood and then removed it, the student’s identity was clear to anyone wishing to see. The hood is a symbol, a reminder of the very real hoods that our government places on human beings as a means of abuse and torture. I am not sure why you say we are afraid to attribute our comments — if it is because we did not post the name of every one of the 30 students who volunteered, then that is absurd. As organizers, we did not ask their permission to do so, nor do we feel the need to. Most people are hesitant to post their full names and addresses on blogs because of spam and other invasions of privacy that have nothing to do with the action we orchestrated. As for the organizers of the event, you’ll find our names splashed all over this blog and the web. I am proud of my activism and consider it a requirement for good citizenship and good lawyering. It is a shame that you think community activism is useless. Perhaps you would prefer to live under an authoritarian regime in which civic society is stifled to the point of total inaction. Finally, I do not do this to improve my prospects of employment. Nevertheless, I am fully aware that my work makes me more, not less, attractive to any employer whom I would want to work for. I wonder, too, about what right you have to call cowardly students strong enough to take a public and transparent stand on what they believe in — when you yourself do not sign your full name in your comment.
Deborah A. Popowski
J.D. Candidate, 2008
Harvard Law School