"War" Interview- Christa Brown

In a pro-war republican town with the most churches per capita than any other city in the United States, USF Sophomore Christa Brown is a Unitarian democrat who questions why America is in Iraq.

Brown lives Lynden, a small town in the Northwest part of Washington with a population of around 10,000, which Christa says 90% of whom are republican.

She went to Lynden high school, where during the 2004 presidential election the school had a mock-vote asking students who they would vote for if they could vote; out of 200 students, 199 said they would vote for George W. Bush, Christa Brown said she was the one out of that 200 that would have voted for John Kerry.

Brown said that Lynden is the by far the most republican town in Northwest Washington. It is very nationalistic, and patriotic.

After 9/11, Christa said that the entire town rallied behind George Bush, and much of the population was defensive and ready to attack.

This led the town to increase the amount of military recruiters at her school and all over the city; she got a call on her 18^th birthday from a recruiter to see if she wanted to enlist.

Christa has two friends that are overseas.

They are both two or three years older than her, but one is in Iraq, and the other was deployed to Afghanistan.

When asked if she would ever serve in the military, Christa hesitated and said she would never make the same choice, but she is able to understand the personal circumstances that allow for such a decision.

“One of my friends was home schooled,” said Brown, “He ended up joining the Army to do stuff with his life.” She says that he told her that he now feels like he has a purpose.

That purpose is one that Christa disagrees with.

She does not believe in the war in Iraq, and disagrees with the fact that many of her peers in Lynden think that we have a moral obligation to be there.

Brown was visibly upset when she talked about the number of casualties involved in the war, especially the Iraqi fatalities, which outnumber American deaths by over 650,000 since 2003, according to a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists and CNN.

Brown asks “What are we doing?” and “Where is the war going?” She says that she thinks America has absolutely no plan.

In Lynden, these questions are taboo. If someone questions the government’s actions they are questioned.

This is why Christa says she’s delighted to be in San Francisco. When she came to the city, she said she was shocked because there were a lot of people like her, so she felt like she didn’t look or seem “crazy”.

Brown has attended war protests, but among other things she also has gone to Bay Area Darfur Coalition rallies and protests, and SFWAR(San Francisco Women Against Rape) events.

She says that she wants to be able to make a difference in this world, and if that means taking issues to her school, to San Francisco, or even back to Lynden, she’ll do just that.