With his short hair, plaid shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, soft-spoken Trey Smith seems an unlikely leader of student peace activists.
But that is the idea.
"There's people who say, 'Well, I saw someone holding a sign about Bush being Satan,' and that sign alone is what keeps people from joining us," Smith said.
Smith, a junior in the Honors Program at UNM, organizes the campus Green Party, is a member of the steering committee of an Albuquerque activist group called Stop the War Machine and has also founded a new organization composed of about 100 high school and college students called the Albuquerque Student Alliance for Progress.
"I've been doing protests and activism for the past two years," he said. "I figured that being a leader needs to be my role, since I don't see any other students doing it."
His role as leader-by-default began when, after Sept. 11, 2001, he felt compelled to do something. He looked to campus organizations for groups he could join.
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"There really wasn't much going on," he said.
Now the campus Greens regularly have a table outside the Student Services Building, where they gather signatures on petitions against a war with Iraq and for Albuquerque citizens to be allowed to conduct weapons inspections at Kirtland Air Force Base. Smith estimates that each week about 80 people sign an anti-war petition and 40 to 50 sign the one for inspections.
This week, Smith's groups were particularly busy on campus. On Wednesday, Feb. 12, he helped lead a rally outside the Air Force ROTC building, across from Dane Smith Hall, to bring attention to a tragic incident in the Gulf War, which occurred on Feb. 12, 1991. That day, he believes, U.S. fighter planes bombed a bomb shelter in Iraq and incinerated 408 people, mostly women and children.
Thursday, Smith sat outside of Johnson Gym to protest the job fair inside. He and other volunteers handed out pamphlets about some of the organizations inside, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell and others.
He and fellow Greens are also planning to make their presence felt outside of Zimmerman Library to raise awareness about provisions in the USA Patriot Act, which allows the government to demand previously confidential information from libraries.
Army recruitment on campus is another issue Smith plans to address.
"It's not that the group opposes having a defense," he said. "We need that. It's how they target low-income people and leave out a lot of what they actually do."
Military recruitment at high schools inspired Smith to create the Albuquerque Student Alliance for Progress. As a debate coach at Manzano high school, he learned from students there that one day a chemistry class had been turned over to a military recruiter for 20 minutes. The students were angry about it and so was Smith.
The student alliance's protest efforts at high schools will focus on The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law more than a year ago. It allows military recruiters to acquire students' contact information from high school administrators. Schools that refuse to comply risk losing funding.
Smith is researching the details of a provision in the Act that allow students to legally avoid participation in the information release. He hopes create an awareness day at each high school organized by the end of February.
"We also need to figure out the legal ramifications of thwarting military recruitment," he said.
Smith said his parents have told him they support his peace activism, as long as he does not get arrested. What surprised and gratified him most, he said, was when his conservative grandparents, who had fought in World War II, called him.
"They told me they were really happy I was protesting this war because it's wrong and immoral," he said.
Smith's next goal is to get ASUNM to pass a resolution against the war. He said that other university student governments have passed similar resolutions.
"If they don't pass it, then I'll run against them next election," he said.
