Petitioning in Ann Arbor, MI

Greetings, Your email was received and clearly 
over stood. These are my thoughts on what was said 
on the issues at the University of Michigan. 
The situation alone was  
different from the every day life I experience. 
Detroit is so much different than Ann Arbor --
Kind of like prison is different than being out on 
these streets. The environment reflects the minds 
of the masses of people there.

One would think that with as much racial diversity 
that Ann Arbor has that the petition that I was 
circulating would have been filled up in a matter 
of minutes. But unfortunately that is not what the 
issue was, things were a whole lot different. One 
may ask what the petition was that I was 
circulating: it was centered around the recent 
issue of foreign students and the new immigration 
policy. I made an attempt to bring the issue to 
the attention of the student population at the
University of Michigan. But, the fact remains 
that many were ignorant to 
the issue and over 60% of the students chose to 
remain that way. I received a number of responses 
believe it or not, mostly from foreign students.

The number of people that were even interested in 
signing let along taking time out of their 
schedules was low. Through this basic situation I 
came to realize that the masses of people don't 
really care to be informed on the things that they 
don't know. But you and I both know that the 
struggle continues.

--a friend of MIM, Michigan.

mim52 adds: This friend helped to circulate 
information and gain signatures from students for 
MIM's campaign to protest Amerika's push to put 
foreign students under surveillance and to have 
university administrations do the dirty work for 
the INS. Though the campaign in Ann Arbor was slow 
going (slower than a similar campaign at Wayne 
State University in Detroit), we also noticed that 
students are coming out of their political shells 
a bit more in Ann Arbor. Students that did not pay 
attention to repression against prisoners are 
starting to understand that the Amerikan 
government will do whatever is necessary to 
protect this country's imperialist interests. When 
that starts to affect students, more students open 
their eyes.

MIM also asked folks to sign two other petitions, 
one to reveal information about the detainees 
arrested as suspected "terrorists" and one 
protesting censorship in Michigan's prisons. We 
have to say that this was an easier task after 
talking about government repression against 
students than getting protest signatures against 
censorship alone. That should come as no surprise 
in a culture that prioritizes individualism and 
frog in the well thinking. Once students start to 
understand the so-called rights being taken from 
them, they can start to see the injustice of 
Amerika's system generally.

MIM met several students interested in the work 
that we do, but leery of Maoism. Several students 
or faculty members were interested in our protest 
campaigns, but rehashed Amerika's rhetoric about 
Stalinist purges, the Great Leap Forward etc... 
Most of the critics would be put in the category 
of anarchist because they wanted a just utopia, 
but without understanding that the stage of the 
dictatorship of the proletariat is imperative for 
that to be reality. MIM pushed people to start 
working with us on the points of unity (i.e. that 
the Amerikan government must disclose information 
on detainees) while they study and discuss 
historical and theoretical issues. If we were all 
to wait until there is complete unity on 
theoretical issues before fighting against 
Amerika's imperialist wars, we would in fact only 
be aiding its wars. Increasingly, there is a need 
to struggle against nihilism. It's always been 
fashionable in Ann Arbor, but the price of such 
inaction is the loss of life. MIM is glad to see 
more people in Ann Arbor taking revolutionary 
politics more seriously, but we encourage folks to 
speed up their pace of their investigation as they 
work with us to fight winnable battles against 
Amerika's growing fascism.