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Parent Article: Human Rights and Free Speech suppressed at Illinois State University |
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I was there |
by Nick
naberve (nospam) ilstu.edu (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
22 Mar 2001
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I am also a member of United Students Against Sweatshops here at ISU and I want to give more detail about the situation. Here at ISU, many of us who are very concerned about Human Rights came together to protest Disney. Tonight we pushed the boundaries.
Our protest began at 5:30 and we were very successful handing out fliers to everyone. We had such a huge presence outside that the people going to see Disney were at a loss of who was a protester and who was with Disney. I was especially surprised to see people say no thanks to corporate Disney fliers thinking the Disney people were with the protesters. Several of us dressed nicely to mix in and look like Disney recruiters, this has been very effective. "Sweaty Mouse" made an appearance and we took over the outside of the lecture hall. We had our numbers and saw the people who wanted to hear about Disney were not especially interested in our concerns. They took our fliers and they went in quickly. Disney has been heavily advertising on our campus and we were fighting back by chalking the Quad right next to Disney ads and putting things like "Disney makes sweatshops happen", "Corporate Greed" and the e-mail address to the National Labor Committee on the sidewalks. Our fliers had the facts from the National Labor Committee. To me, this protest has a lot to do with finger pointing. We have our facts, we don't want to ignore them, we don't want others to ignore this either. There is no way anyone who attended Disney tonight could have not been aware of our presence. I was outside when this started but when I went inside things were a mess. One of our USAS students stood up and started talking out about sweatshop abuse in the lecture hall, taking up Disney's time to recruit. I missed the speech part of this inside protest but what happened was that we stunned Disney. They could not and would not respond, so they left us with the stage and called the cops. We had the stage for 15 minutes and shouting started going on between us and the family type who were getting impatient and wanted us to get out. The tension was incredible. We had briefly won our campus back and the people who wanted Disney got angry.
The police arrived and Nino, our protester with the stage would not leave. He had his hands in front of him telling the cops and the audience that since he was being arrested, he wanted to have the handcuffs put on him now, so that everyone could see who the police favored. This did not happen but it shows how our worlds are so heavily separated, all inside one lecture hall.
My concern now is how we can take back our University and remove Disney from our campus. They not only have the right to advertise freely in cafeterias where we cannot, they have money to waste. We are forced to oppose them and we will not let our concerns be put to the side. Our protest tomorrow is addressed to the people who went to see Disney and are turning in applications to work retail or janitorial jobs at Disney World so they can put Disney on their resume. We will be taking on other issues, but this fight will go on next fall when Disney comes back. This is the third time we have protested Disney. We are making ourselves as visible as possible because this issue is transparent to a lot of people.
I don't have all the details to this protest, I had a night class at 7 and could not stay. Hopefully we'll get some pictures on the net soon and get this issue on the urbana indymedia headlines. More to come! |
