I’m quite surprised that the Daily Forty-Niner reporter covering the anti-war rally on Oct. 24 overlooked one critical activist group caught in the fray between the shouting radical socialists and the tiny contingency of neocons in attendance.
This activist group I speak of is the Students for Ron Paul 2008 group on campus of which I am a part. With 50,000 volunteers nationwide, we support the one-time Libertarian-turned-Republican presidential candidate.
Ron Paul is the only 2008 Republican candidate who has opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and all foreign wars of aggression, for that matter. I might add that he stands opposed to the Orwellian-named Patriot Act as well.
Our presence was felt, but no one wanted to admit it, save for a few uneasy faces.
Once the rally began, it didn’t take too long before the organizers began to harp on unrelated issues, such as illegal immigrant rights, gay rights and (fill in the blank) rights.
It soon degraded from its original intent of being an anti-war protest and transformed into a collectivist buffet. I won’t even speak of the so-called Conservative Students Union, whose leader was quoted as saying, “There are so many theories regarding the war. My loyalty lies with the president.”
Does that even make sense?
Neither of these groups speaks for the common American, which is why we crashed the rally to tout Ron Paul. One does not have to adhere to an extreme ideology in order to accomplish such a monumental feat as ending the war, but unfortunately that’s the only way you get noticed sometimes.
– Nelson Lourenco, senior graphic design major
