Letter: Red Hand Week

Dear Editor,

There are over 250,000 soldiers under the age of 18 actively and illegally fighting in war zones around the world. The Red Hand Campaign is the perfect and easiest way for everyone at SBHS to help put a stop to this. A treaty came into effect in February 2002 banning the use of soldiers under the age of 18 in war. However, as many as 20 of the countries who signed this treaty are not abiding by it. The Red Hand Campaign is an effort to present one million red handprints with signatures to the UN in order to show them that we care deeply about the enforcement of this treaty.

The week of May 27-30 is our “Red Hand Awareness Week” at school and we will be providing multiple opportunities for each and every student to give their handprint and/or signature, and it is very important that everyone participates. We’ll be on the senior lawn as well as wandering around every day at lunch.

There is absolutely no reason not to be a part of this important movement: no money is required, and barely any time. Just show up and be counted. Most importantly, it is a big issue that drastically affects the lives of kids just like us every single day. If these government groups are corrupt enough to use 13-year-olds in combat, they obviously do not stop there. Many children are given a quota for the number of people they must kill everyday in order not to be killed themselves. The psychological damage that is done to hundreds of thousands of children is everlasting. A sixteen year old girl from Central Africa opened up to a Human Rights Watch worker and shared, “I feel so bad about the things that I did. It disturbs me so much that I inflicted death on other people. I still dream about the boy from my village that I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me, saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying.”

In sunny Santa Barbara it is hard to imagine that these things are happening to hundreds of thousands of members of our generation around the world, but they are, and these kids are helpless, but we have a chance to do something about it. The Red Hand Campaign is the perfect way for us to get involved because it gives us the opportunity to make a huge difference in a world problem affecting our peers. All we need to do is dedicate a few minutes of our time to sign our names or leave a handprint. Our collection of red hands and signatures will join the handprints being gathered worldwide and then be delivered to the UN by Human Rights Watch workers and possibly some SBHS ambassadors next February.

Anna Minsky
Junior