It is hard to miss the campus chalkings from UW-Madison student group Stop the War, but the organization is greater than simply pigment on pavement.
A group of students originally founded Stop the War as a youth branch of the Madison Peace Coalition, according to UW-Madison senior Miguel Leon.
\The group was made because people knew the government was going to start waging war in the name of the people that died on Sept. 11,"" he said.
Although none of the group's actions have been illegal, UW-Madison freshman and treasurer of Stop the War Matthew Maus said the organization uses more extreme measures to get its message to the public.
""Really to get any recognition to a certain extent, you have to [do more],"" he said. ""Big marches up to the Capitol do so much and they're very good, but also the sit-ins where the four kids got arrested-we didn't have anything to do with that-work. Even though it's illegal, it does get attention.""
The organization has staged numerous protests and rallies on campus, focusing on high-profile events like the Bring Our Troops Home concert that featured local and Chicago-based punk and hip-hop artists.
For the recent inauguration, they arranged for a bus and organized 57 people to participate in the counter-inaugural protest in Washington.
UW-Madison sophomore Lydia Barbash-Riley said the group is planning activities centered on educating students and increasing participation.
""We're setting up another march coming up in the near future,"" she said. ""We really want to get the message out and it's really important for us to build a base of people to support our cause. In terms of my own personal experience with talking to people about the war, the more they know about it, the more they support what we believe in.""
Working on getting military recruiters off campus is another goal of Stop the War, but Barbash-Riley said campus unity and support are needed to accomplish this aim.
""We're also working on a campaign to get recruiters off campus,"" she said. ""They successfully did that at a college in Seattle and that's going to be a major project here, but it's always going to be a really big challenge because I know the recruiters bring revenue to the school through the federal government.""
For now, expanding the organization remains the top concern for Stop the War as campus involvement declined after the November elections.
""The most important thing right now is we're trying to expand the student base,"" Maus said. ""In Madison there's a lot of people against the war, but I think most people are pretty demobilized since Bush's re-election, so we need to change that.\
