The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future as a

Peace Activist

Hi--c'mon in. Peace Activist? Yeah, I guess I could offer some ideas along that line. Just a question--is everything you own tie-dyed? I mean, the shirts I can see, and maybe even the pants--but how the hell did you manage the sneakers? Nevermind--I think you can expect something like this:

You're starting out okay trying this line in high school, but you won't really get going until you hit university. You'll need to go somewhere that's suitably left wing--my advice is don't go to any college where the agriculture faculty is bigger than the women's studies department. Eventually you'll take your message to the world, but you'll need a relatively friendly incubator to develop it first.

You'll take a few courses to justify being there, such as sociology, or global studies--things that don't really take up much of your time. If you can get into upper level courses like "The Marxist Dialectic as it informs German Expressionist Cinema" I'd say go for it. You need classrooms where you can practice being painfully earnest in discussions that no one in the real world would care about, but which stir up such passion in your soul that you physically threaten classmates who vociferously defend opposing viewpoints.

No doubt there'll be several "peace groups" already on campus--you'll infiltrate them subtly, but remain noncommital as you look for places where they stray from your particular brand of peacenik orthodoxy. Perhaps they'll be soft on CIA crimes in the Latin American political sphere, or they'll fail to jump quickly enough to support the politically-corrrect side of the latest Sri Lankan hostilities. Once you find their soft underbelly, make yourself the voice crying in the wilderness. It helps if any of their leadership is male--you can regularly use add the words "male-dominated" or "anti-feminist" to your diatribes about the "military-industrial complex". Ironic that one comes from a general, isn't it?

Over time you'll wear down the leadership of one of the groups, since senior students actually have to worry about things like writing thesis papers and eventually graduating, and you will happily take control and begin shifting the group's direction to gain more notoriety off campus. Your nude sit-in at an army recruiting center makes newcasts nationwide, and it's only a matter of time before you're being interviewed by television and radio personalities from all over the country.

Sadly though, universities don't go full speed all year, and the four months downtime in the summer erases the progress of your publicity campaign. Many of your key helpers don't return the following year, either having graduated or simply run out of tuition money because their focus on activism dropped their grades and ended their scholarships. You try to forge onwards, but you lack the drive to take it to the next level. It's then your knight in shining armor comes to the rescue.

He'll be a refugee from an Ivy League college--possibly old money, but without the banal passivity that characterizes so many of his ilk. Instead, he'll drop in on your weekly coffeehouse meeting and quote some passages from a Helen Caldicott book from memory--you'll be entranced by the smoothness and sincerity of his delivery. It becomes clear quite quickly he's interested in both your group and in you personally, and soon the two of you are a team, working to spread your message against militarism while sharing the joy of your newfound love in his loft apartment--saving the cost of rent by moving in together allows you that much more to spend on leaflet printing.

It's Neville--you can't quite get used to his old money moniker--who plans some of your more successful publicity stunts. He skydives into a local wine tasting festival and convinces you and your friends to pose for a fundraising calendar wearing nothing but the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Soon you're no longer heading just a campus group, but something spreading throughout your city, and to cities nearby. You rent office space and buy a listing in the Yellow Pages. Your greatest publicity coup comes when your group heads a protest at an air show, and while the police are trying to quell a few skirmishes in their riot gear, you take a night stick to the head and wake up the next day in a hospital bed, surrounded by get well wishes from peaceniks around the world.

The video footage of your attack is damning, and the police begin an investigation, but the actual identity of the officer who assaulted you is unknown, though you can remember his face clearly. In a few days you are released from the hospital, and rather than trouble Neville, you take a cab home. As you enter your apartment building, you are shocked to see your assailant leaving your apartment. When you question Neville he admits paying an acquaintance to impersonate a police officer and strike you. You are shocked and run out of the apartment and back to your parents' home. He phones you and tries to explain that he did it for the greater good, but you refuse to talk to him. A few days later he vanishes, and his signing authority for the organization allows him to steal the huge windfall of donations your injuries brought in. You are too heartbroken to go to the police.

The police investigation eventually uncovers the fraud, and the story breaks at the same time as some of your colleagues are quoted as saying that the Allies shouldn't have gone to war against Hitler and that the Holocaust was exaggerated to allow warmongering leaders to send young men to their death to fatten the bank accounts of arms merchants.

You are soon facing the possibility of fraud charges, and each day as you leave your home to testify at an investigation of your organization's tactics and fundraising, you push through a gamut of hostile protesters who label you an anti-semetic Holocaust denier.

After taking a one-semester leave, you transfer to a quiet university 300 miles away and get a degree in communications. By your 25th birthday you're working in the public relations department of large oil company. You do donate a small portion of your monthly income to Amnesty International, though, and maybe you'll wear the tie-dye stuff on weekends around the house.