The Peace Panel Project,
mini size, had a good showing at the "US Defense Spending" caucus of the CSU Chico Town Hall Meeting 2013 last Wednesday night. Ours was one of 39 break-out groups with topics from California Prison Overcrowding to Birth Control and Reproductive Rights involving over 900 students. It was "students, faculty, and community members discussing solutions to important contemporary policy problems." With the goal of helping the students "engage in civic discourse and begin to develop the tools needed for lifelong political participation." I was invited to attend, for the second year, as a consultant community member. Their web site is www.csuchico.edu/fye/thm/. After some h'orderves a
nd orientation we got in our break-out groups. Mine was attended by Antoine, acting as moderator, Boshion, a grad student, who had attended a NATO meeting and had some other international experience, and nineteen CSU students. As a backdrop in the classroom, where we met, I was able to put up the Mini Peace Panels shown above. For the next hour and fifteen minutes I became progressively more and more shocked at how most of the students in our group only recited main stream media stories as "research" they had done on the subject of defense spending. I walked away convinced of the importance of continuing the Peace Panel Project work of offering alternative sources of information to college students on how every dollar is a vote, Nonviolent Communication, and Project Censored. I set about to refine my message to best communicate with this particular target market. New Panels were underway.
