A-Infos (en) US, Portland, Oregon, Media, Campus radical group rises again - Students for a Democratic Society* is back, and area members are focusing on the Iraq war

Thousands of small white and red flags symbolizing Iraq war deaths spread like 
flowers in front of Reed College and flutter in the breeze at Lewis & Clark 
College. ---- The flags - each representing Iraqi and U.S. deaths - mark the 
work of a fledgling student activist group that has sprung up at both campuses: 
Students for a Democratic Society. ---- Yes, SDS is back. ---- The radical 
student group that shook college campuses during the height of the Vietnam War 
in the 1960s is budding quietly on campuses across the nation. For baby boomers, 
SDS evokes images of sit-ins, rallies, marches, clashes with police, students 
taking over buildings. Or in the case of the Weathermen, an SDS spinoff, blowing 
up buildings. ---- But for college students today, SDS offers a model for 
organizing political action for a new generation in a new century, says Matt 
Wasserman, 21, a senior SDS member at Reed.

"Going to a march once a year is not necessarily going to make any difference," 
he says. "I want SDS to be part of stopping this war."

Even if it means confronting police.

At least 14 Lewis & Clark students, including four SDS members, joined those 
from Olympia and Tacoma last weekend at the Port of Portland to protest the 
shipment of Stryker vehicles to Iraq.

A video posted on the Northwest SDS Web site and YouTube shows Tacoma police 
using tear gas against protesters in scenes reminiscent of the 1960s. Danielle 
Hurley, 19, a freshman and SDS member at Lewis & Clark, says she was hit in the 
arm and three places in the back by rubber bullets and tear gas.

Both the Reed and Lewis & Clark SDS are recruiting students to join an anti-war 
rally Sunday in the South Park Blocks of downtown Portland.
So far, only Reed and Lewis & Clark have organized SDS chapters in Oregon. In 
Washington, chapters meet at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, the 
University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, and Western Washington University in 
Bellingham.

The five chapters are small, collectively drawing at least 100 active members. 
More than 60 showed up for a regional SDS meeting at Reed and Lewis & Clark in 
November.

But they draw more students to hear speakers and other events. At Reed, hundreds 
of students helped plant the 120,000 white flags the represent Iraqi deaths and 
another 3,000 red ones symbolizing U.S. soldiers killed in the war.

The new SDS chapters, unlike the old, have no elected leaders. They include a 
diverse group of left-wingers, including Marxists and anarchists, says Mary 
Sackley, 21, an SDS member and a junior at Lewis & Clark.

"I like the idea of seeing SDS as a real way for students to have a collective 
voice politically across the nation," says Sackley, in a telephone interview 
from Washington, D.C., where she was attending a National Conference on 
Organized Resistance.

College Republican groups also have expanded on Oregon college campuses, from 
six chapters to 23 in the past year, including one at Lewis & Clark, says John 
Swanson, chairman of the Oregon Federation of College Republicans.

SDS doesn't have much impact on the larger world, says David Merryman, 19, a 
freshman at Lewis & Clark and chairman of the College Republican chapter there.

"I don't like their tactics, and I don't think encouraging students to interfere 
with troop deployments at the Port of Tacoma is good for anyone," says Merryman, 
whose Republican group, also formed last September, draws about 24 students.

The new SDS members say they are committed to non-violence but also to action, 
even if it requires civil disobedience.

Within weeks of opening their chapter last fall, four Lewis & Clark SDS members 
were arrested in an anti-war demonstration after refusing to leave the office of 
Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.

"We needed to take a stand," says Sackley, one of the students arrested.

The new SDS has a broader agenda beyond Iraq war that includes protesting 
"American imperialism" and other root causes of war, human rights violations and 
environmental degradation.

Reed SDS students are trying to get Coca-Cola machines off campus, alleging the 
company mistreats workers in Colombia and exploits fragile water systems in India.

SDS member Leah Savitsky, 18, a Reed freshman, says she wants to help build a 
national student movement.

"I feel obligated in my morality and my position in society, because I'm a 
citizen in this world, to take some action," she says.

Her mother, Terri Cohn knows about SDS. Cohn grew up in San Francisco and 
attended the University of California at Berkeley, a center of student dissent, 
during the early 1970s. She respects her daughter's decision to join SDS but 
worries about her safety.

"We live in a time when people should stand up and make their feelings known," 
says Cohn.

The original SDS, founded in 1962, called for the creation of a "new left in 
America." Seven years later, a radical splinter group called the Weatherman took 
over the SDS national office and shut it down.

The old SDS was active on many Oregon college campuses, often supporting other 
causes such as the Black Student Union's occupation of Eliot Hall at Reed 
College, recalls Maurice Isserman, a Reed SDS member during the late 1960s and 
now a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

Portland swarmed with activists and "absorbed us," says Isserman, co-author of 
the book "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s."

Several former SDS leaders, now in their 50s and 60s, revived the new SDS last 
spring and staged an official founding convention in Chicago in August. Isserman 
says he's encouraged that today's college students, not the elders, will 
reinvent SDS for the 21st century.

"I found them refreshingly non-doctrinaire, non-nostalgic and very thoughtful 
about what they are doing," he says. "They are attracted to the 1960s as a model 
of activism, but they don't think they are living in the 1960s."
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* An antiauthoritarian anticapitalist network - the authoritarians of the left 
complain they are blocked out of it.....
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