This weekend I attended the CSAW (California Schools Against War) Conference held in Berkley. I go to school in Santa Barbara. I came to this meeting thinking that I was going to work with other schools and help in regard of making solid plans to bring to our campus and help to plan. I was looking for ideas, for suggestions, a bit of suggestion and also I wanted to know where other students stood on the Anti-War stance.

What ended up happening was just this enormous and very upsetting event. The conference started with a panel on Saturday morning. No other students from other schools spoke during this time, mainly people from Berkley. Lunch was served.Workshops were held and I viewed the workshops as the best thing that came out of my traumatizing weekend. The next day on Sunday there was a delegation meeting. The Berkeley group without asking any other schools had decided to only allow 5 delegates from each school to be involved in the voting and decision making process during this conference. So 5 delegates from each school who basically named themselves delegates were picked to make choices for their entire school without even having a chance to speak with the other members from their school. From the time the process of the delegation meeting started it was doomed to fail. In NO WAY was there talk of process, all 190 people were basically TOLD that we would have to be in a majority voting process without it EVER being discussed. We were just told this was how things were going to be, no discussion was even held about this. Please remember that we have 45 schools present at this conference, non of which were told that they had a choice between consensus decision making process, majority voting, or other forms of decision making. There was no access to a list server or phone conference calls by schools, we were told that there were email list servers, I know my schools and a few others who tried numerous times to contact The Berkley Stop the War Coalition but our emails went unanswered. Nothing about the process and the format of this conference regarding how we were going to make decisions were known, and there were many people there who were very young, and this was their first event like this who expressed over and over they did not understand the process and felt like they were shut down, glossed over or just plain ignored.

Back to the conference, they asked the schools to put forth proposals that we wanted to be voted on. There were 25 proposals in all and we had from 10:00 AM