[884] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Discuss Mandatory Dining at the UA Town Hall Meeting Tonight
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter M Finin)
Thu Oct 4 13:51:43 2001
Message-ID: <200110041731.NAA10190@biohazard-cafe.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 13:31:17 -0400
Reply-To: "Documentation at http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html"
<MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU>, Peter M Finin <pfinin@MIT.EDU>
From: Peter M Finin <pfinin@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
Jay sez:
|> this seems like it may be getting to my point. it is the situation that
|> their decisions affect our communities moreso, and in different ways, than
|> their vista can allow them to see: it hits us at home. you propose that
|> we hit them at home, because it will force them to change their actions.
|> the fact that people (mind you, likely a small number, but as we all know,
|> that's all this sort of situation ever needs) wish to change their actions
|> by instilling fear into their lives is personally quite frightening.
|> this is the first thing i felt after reading today's emails.
To try to understand the fact that people feel we need to escalate
to something which is neither civil, or polite, or well reasoned, or
has a scheduled end time, first notice that the people doing this are
all (as nearly as I've been able to tell) seniors+. The reason they
think that this is the only way to make real, meaningful change is
that they've tried civil, polite, well reasoned arguments, they've
tried protests with no scheduled end time. It doesn't work very well
against the MIT administration.
|> some of these people are reasonable people who have overlooked or
|> misinterpreted the intentions of the general plan they have, and therefore
|> their implementation of it has missed the mark. others have been deemed
|> by repeated student interaction to have little respect for the students or
|> for their ideas. it is a fact that communication has broken down, but if
|> we find a totally new system of going about things, then maybe there won't
|> be so many surprises anymore. maybe when we talk to (some of) them, they
|> will have a way to go about incorporating our suggestions (and, as things
|> go, often demands as well). yall may jump on me about this, but the
|> dormcon meeting with cmvest yesterday appeared to be at least somewhat
|> fruitful towards this end.
Right now it looks like we may be winning on the dining issue. We
can't let this make us complacent and think that everything is fine.
Everything is not fine. The admins are going to keep trying other
ways of screwing us over, and we won't be able to stop all of them.
That's what we need to do something about.
|> perspective from the real world (hold on a second, burst the bubble, mit
|> is not the end-all, be-all of human existence, no matter how much we
|> deeply care for it and hate to see it fucked with): these are just people
|> with jobs, who may have made mistakes. they may even have the
|> misperception that the students in general are extremely immature and
|> cannot act like the adults that they should be. but you are suggesting to
|> make them feel like their physical saftey, and worth as human beings, is
|> endangered. you have also suggested interfering with the institute to
|> what i would call an illegally fraudulent degree. i feel like your
|> perception of The Line has been blurred too much by your anger.
There are two ways that we could try to get them to treat us as
adults, and get some change to the structure of MIT that will insure
that we will continue to be treated as results.
The first is to convince them that we should be, by signing
petitions, and calmly reasoning with them, and having a tool in
outside of Chuck Vest's office. We've tried all of that. It has
failed many, many times over. You're going to have to argue pretty
convincingly to get me to believe it'll work this time.
The second way is to demand that they treat us as adults, and demand
that they make changes to the structure of MIT to insure that they
continue to do so. We make these demands, and then we force them to
listen, and force them to act, by making it impossible for them to
continue on with their daily business until they do.
This is a perfectly legitimate kind of protest. Yes, it does
interfere with the institute. That's the whole point! When workers
go on strike, they are disrupting the businesses they work for.
That's why strikes are effective.
We will keep being ignored until we make ourselves unignorable.
|> Jay
-Peter Finin
