A small protest last night at the military recruiting center located near Celebration Cinema in the Celebration Village development at the corner of East Beltline and Knapp—representing the Air Force, Army, and Navy—sent Army recruiters home an hour before their 8:00pm scheduled closing time after protestors assembled in front of the doors. The group of ten people, holding a large banner that read “Stop Enlisting and Start Resisting” as well as several smaller signs pounded on drums and chanted for about an hour before the Army recruiters left the building.
During the protest, signs and chants highlighted the lies told by military recruiters and facts about military recruiting. The group held signs reading “1/3rd of recruits receive no college funding,” “1/3 of the homeless population are veterans,” and a sign highlighting what happens to women in the military where one-third of women in the military are raped and 90% report being sexually harassed. In addition, the group distributed leaflets to people going into the move theatre or going to the surrounding restaurants. The leaflets, written under the theme of “Recruiters Lie, You Die” highlighted the deaths of 2,417 US soldiers and 34,711 Iraqi civilians in the ongoing Iraq War where the majority of new recruiters will ultimately be deployed. The leaflet also highlighted the fact that no matter what recruiters say and even if they provide information in writing, recruits’ enlistment contract can be changed without notice. While there was less pedestrian traffic than expected, the group leafleted the majority of the cars in the parking lots immediately near the recruiting center and gave leaflets to most of the people walking by the protest on either side of the street. The response to the protest, especially from younger people, was primarily positive, with several youth describing how they are relentlessly pursued by military recruiters and that they are told a variety of lies, with some reporting that military recruiters tried to convince them not to go to college or that they had friends who joined the military and that the military broke the promises made by recruiters.
From the start of the protest, the recruiters present had an expectedly negative reaction to the protest. As soon as the group stood in front of the door to the Army recruiting office, a recruiter dressed in full military uniform came outside and looked at the signs and expressed disapproval and called one of the participants a “douche bag.” One of the participants who was leafleting cars in “the Celebration Village” parking lot was approached by two military recruiters behind the center who warned him “not to put the leaflets on government cars.” The recruiters went on to tell them that the leaflets and the protest were “gay,” reflecting the military’s institutionalized homophobia. When the recruiter was called out for being homophobic, he asked why the protestors were there and when told that the protest was designed to make their job harder, he expressed frustration and said that the leaflets could be put on other cars, just not the government vehicles. Several members of the group also observed the recruiters inside the center making mocking gestures towards the protestors.
The protest, organized by the group Activate, will likely be one of many held at area military recruiting stations and was the first event in the group’s campaign to challenge military recruiters in Grand Rapids and to challenge the lies that they routinely tell in order to get new recruits. In the future, the group will continue to engage recruiters through a variety of different tactics that will directly engage both recruiters and those who are targeted by military recruiters. The group can be contacted at antimilitarizationgr ( at ) mediamouse.org.
