Of petitions and generations.

Let me start by saying that I am the first member of my father's family with no major ties to any military. I went to a newly built Canadian school of about 1200 students, which opened right at the start of my high school years. The building was still under contruction when we first started our classes.

Now, I may have a habit of criticizing those typically admired (Tolkien, Gandhi, et cetera) but I don't do things just to be rebellious, so keep that in mind when I say that in high school I was part of an effort to get military recruiters out of our school cafeteria. Of my two favourite teachers, one consistently referred to the vice principal in charge of last names from within the middle third of the alphabet as a fascist. Considering his mother was head of her region's Seccion Feminina under Franco, he was actually quite qualified to say that. The other was the philosophy teacher who told us he'd thought he was an idealist until he read Marx.

The story starts with a routine mid-term report card. We were gathered into "homeroom groups" which, as the way the scheduling system works here meant we had no actual homerooms, consisted of students from all three grades who had never seen eachother before and a math teacher none of us had had in a classroom that wasn't his. Before being given our report cards we had to sit through a boring presentation, half slideshow and half travesty with a few veins of video shot through it for good measure, which I swear must have been at least 20 minutes long altogether. In terms of unneccessary length, the only experience I can compare it to is a goddamn presidential inauguration. Seriously.

The guy sitting in front of me was getting really huffy. I guess he must have been worried about his grades, or maybe patience wasn't his strong point, I don't know, but he blurted out, "Can we just get our report cards and go?!" very indignantly.

And I, in that soft and quiet little voice I always use in a social setting where I'm not comfortable, said: "We can't. The school is a machine that doesn't care about its students."

And then he was quiet, until I was on my way to my locker after we finally (finally, finally) got our report cards, and he stopped me in the hall.

He said, "There's a group that meets in room 203 on Wednesdays, I think you'd like it. We're very anti-mainstream."

At the time, I was struggling to make friends of any kind, and had been trying to find extracurriculars to meet people with similar interests. I told my dad before that Wednesday had rolled around and he said they'd better not be neo-nazis, but when I showed up on Wednesday they were various kinds of leftists (sadly, the latter is only slightly better than the former in my dad's opinion).

We didn't have a name at the time, but we eventually settled on something abbreviated as SFS. Students for Freedom & Socialism, maybe, but considering only three of us fifteen kids were self-identified socialists and a lot of our detractors liked to crusade in the name of freedom I guess that wouldn't be very accurate. The point is that SFS is where I met my good friend Owen, whose patched clothes displayed prominently the symbols for anarchy and equality (if this sounds like contradiction to you, you have been lied to). SFS drafted a petition to submit to the principal about the military recruiters, and I spent lunch hours the remainder of that week and the entirety of the next one collecting signatures without bothering to even eat lunch.

True, I believed those recruiters in their fatigues shouldn't be there and still do believe it, but at the time I guess I really wanted something to fight for. I'd like to think my motives now are a little more selfless.

There came a day between the petition's drafting and its submission that the recruiters set up a makeshift booth at lunch, as they did whenever they came, and we were collecting signatures at lunch as we always did, and Owen (who is good at this sort of thing) knew about it shortly beforehand and handed us all stacks of the anti-recruitment pamphlets we'd been showing to people who wanted to know why we were against it. We stood about twenty or thirty feet away from their desk-booth-thing and did our thing, and that fascist vice principal, Mrs.-Greer-in-charge-of-a-third-of-the-surnames, came up to us and told us we were being disrespectful to dead soldiers. I shit you not, that is the reason she demanded we stop immediately. I wanted to suggest that maybe war was direspectful to dead soldiers, but it's not like she gave any of us a chance to speak.

We didn't stop, of course, though we did move to the mezzanine area one floor above the recruiters. But this was around course-picking time for next year, and college-picking time for the grade 12s, and when I came in to confirm my course selections with the guidance counsellor in charge of my last name (the three of them divided the workload the same way the three VPs did) she wouldn't let me leave the room until she'd given me a long lecture about my involvement in standing half a hallway away from the recruitment boys with a handful of pamphlets like I'd drowned a bag of kittens in the harbour or something equally heinous. The phrase that stands out most in my memory was "some of us at this school have family in the military", with the implication that I was petitioning for them all to be swiftly beheaded.

She told me Mrs. Greer had had a talk with her about me specifically, perhaps because I was the only member of SFS taking the prestigious IB ("International Baccalaureate" or "I Bullshit", depending on your company at the time) programme. Apparently, the top-of-the-top students of which the school is so damn proud are not allowed to have opinions which contradict those of Mrs. Greer. I knew students were numbers rather than names, but until that moment I hadn't known I was an expensive pet on display to impress the neighbours.

So I let her finish, though it cost me dearly by cutting into my all-important essay time, and then standing at her door with my hand on the knob I turned and said, "I have family in the military. I lost family in the military. I don't want to see that happen to anyone else. Have a good day, Mrs. Creaser."

Then I left.

Four days before the pamphlet debacle, I'd been in the library and approached a deskful of my IB English classmates I didn't know very well about signing the petition. As she wrote her name and information down, one of them asked me what my family thought of me doing this. I told her the truth, that as of my favourite cousin recently enlisting I was now the only eligible member of my family who was not and had never been in the army. She was impressed, told me that had to take guts, and after that the two of her table of five who hadn't signed suddenly stopped me when I turned to go. They'd changed their minds. They signed.