i r Mftligan Maitlj Seventy-seven years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan under authority of Board/in Control of Student Publications NEAL BRUSS Free the pigs: The sty's the limit nard St., Ann Arbor, Mich. News Phone: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily exp ress the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. SDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1968 NIGHT'EDITOR: RON LANDSMAN Welfare decision: Commentary on protest THE AGREEMENT reached Monday night between the welfare mothers, the county board of supervisdrs and the social services board, does not constitute a victory for anyone. It is simply a com- -ment'ary on the effectiveness of protest. The entire issue of '"need"-that the mothers needed clothes for their children to attend school-was never substantiated except by verbal testimony and was ob- liviated Wednesday for a new issue- police brutality. It was .only the stupidity of the sher- iff's department which eventually led to the power behind the welfare mothers. Daily Managing Editor Steve Wildstrom was arrested without cause, and the power behind the protests of this and subse- quent police brutality was the determin- ing factor in the welfare dispute. THEISSUE of welfare is not an impor- tant one in itself. Welfare is an an- achronistic concept. To support welfare is to support the institution that is basic- ally opposed to the concept of self-de- termination. This is not to say the mothers shouldn't have received what they got-or perhaps even more. The Aid to Dependent Chil- dren system, which is supposedly deter- mined by professional sociologists, cer- tainly should be updated if, in fact, chil- dren won't go to school unless it is. And all needs-across the board-when they are sufficiently proved, should be-accele- rated across the board. Perhaps this means an "upgrading" as well as "up- dating" of the ADC system.' But the needs were never really proved. The mothers presented the county with a list of "basic minimum needs" for sev- eral age groups of children. The social services board-the only available offi-. cial bureau truly able to evaluate thatf need-never said the mothers' conten- tions were correct or incorrect. Alfred E. Brose, director, and his three phlegmatic commissioners totally neglected their prime responsibility during the negotia- tioni: to determine precisely what need existe$. If this wasn't impossible, at least their prdfessional opinions should have been demanded., IMMEDIACY of the situation made an excursion by the negotiating par- ties into the Ann Arbor ghetto impracti- cal. But certainly someone, 'from the Uni- versity or' the city, was qualified to offer a concurring or dissenting opinion of the mothers' claim. It was difficult, without this second opinion, for any supervisor or mediator to feel Mrs. Shirley Haywood and her group were purporting a truth. They claimed 137 children were almost stark naked, and yet they sat before the county board in decent clothes, cradling well- groomed children and certainly appear- ing far from starvation. It was then even more difficult for those present M4onday to make a judg- ment on the validity of the claim. No professional social worker or sociologist dissented, true, but neither did any con- cur with the mothers. In their traditional style, liberal county supervisors do some- times champion the meek, but there was no evidence of meekness throughout the week, other 'than that presented verbally by the mothers. And the degree and ex- tent of poverty they claimed simply did not conform with what the average sup- ervisor would consider possible in Ann Arbor. THE POVERTY situation they purport may exist. Ignorance of the repugnant is one of the present inadequacies of democracy. Appearances may be deceiv- ing, but when all that is presented are appearances, a judgment counter to them is difficult to ascertain as feasible on its own merits. And thus, the judgment ultimately granted the welfare mothers was not as- certained by reason. The solution was ascertained with the mitigation of fear- fear from protest. As county supervisor Hillery Goddard so adequately conceded that night, "I guess the time's come when you com- promise, because the other guy's got the upper hand. They've got it, we don't." Goddard was naive. If the power of protest did determine the ultimate deci- sion, it is fittingly ironic that the county board sat in a position of relative omni- potence Monday night. They had been so frightened by the events of the past sev- eral days, they failed to scrutinize their own position. THE DEMONSTRATIONS had waned, the students were becoming uncom- fortably aware of the incongruity be- tween protest against police brutality and protest against welfare. Neither the students nor the mothers could afford more arrests or demonstra- tions. No one could have been more incorrect than county chairman Robert Harrison as he told the supervisors before their final vote, "You can vote as you like, gentlmen, but let me warn you of the repercussions if we don't accept this." Evep though. the protest was waning, it had been constructed to maintain an appearance-at least to the county board -of being all powerful. AND THE TIME did come, Mr. Goddard, when the power of the people ruled. Most of the time, only the representatives of the people rule. But Monday night, democracy reigned for the people, by the people. The mothers and students should not so much now celebrate or claim a victory in the issue, but rather in their effective- ness. They aren't allowed to vote-the students are too "immajure" and the blacks are too black. But the events this week show there are other means of being heard and of determining the factors that govern our lives. True democratic power appeared Mon- day night, even though slightly. The sub- stance' of the protest which proceeded Monday night was a spontaneous moral committment by many individuals. This is grass roots democratic power in action; and we should. now focus our attention on the use of such democratic power to the avails of democracy. -JIM HECK YOU REMEMBER how the witch Circe by her magic changed the comrades of brave Ulysses into pigs: "She gave them all comfortable seats, and made them a posset, cheese and meal and pale honey mixt with Pramnelan wine; but she put dangerous drugs in the mess, to make them wholly forget their native land. When they had swallowed it, she gave them a tap of her wand at once and herded them into pens; for now they had pigs' heads and grunts and bristles, pigs all over ex- cept that their minds were the same as before." Most persons. in America - nearly all whites and some blacks - are pigs, much like Ulysses' companions. That is to say they have been so radically transfigured they can only act like pigs although inside their minds they may remember what it would be to be human. The memory of humanity is stronger in some .than in others, but nonetheless, all are enchanted. ALL ARE PIGS. The difference between most Ameri- cans and the police, who are now commonly c a l1e d "pigs," is no more than a difference of behavior. It is not a. difference of species. The police pigs are put in situations in which they are constantly called upon to think and act like pigs, to affirm the piggishness of the larger society. So the Police Pigs must root and wallow and attack the young, while the other American pigs grunt quietly in protest and try to pretend they are zo less than their memory of humanity. But all are pigs, and the obvious banality of the police is only a constant assertion of our conymon char- acter. The police, as social scientist Lee Rainwater puts it, are our "dirty workers." They keep the oppressed in line so that the fruits of exploitation may be taken from them. The police put their tusks to the oppressed - in the ghetto and in Vietnam - but only in the name of the 'larger community. Teachers and social workers who keep the oppressed placated and powerless are also dirty workers. Their obviously piggish behavior allows other American pigs"the luxury of a suburban sty where mem- ories of humanity may not be interrupted by the cries of the oppressed, SO LET US be very certain that if any of us more sophisticated pigs were put in a police academy, given the gun and a can of Mace, and set to do the great American dirty work, we'd quickly forget those memories of hu- manity and root and snort as wildly as the greatest Pig. For Circe is an American system which makes us all pigs. And to be a man transfigured into a pig is to be oppressed, just like our victims. No wonder the distinction between the pig and his victim becomes confused, no wonder the student is a nigger, like the housewife and the businessman. It may, in fact, be better to be an op- pressed human exploited by pigs than to be a pig. Or perhaps there is little difference. The Circe spell will be broken when American so- ciety becomes non-racist, non-imperialist, non-material- ist and imbued by a positive culture which, emerging from the present pigsty is unimaginable. We are all so much the pig that we can only identify the piggishness we hope to shake off; because we are pigs it is difficult to determine what would be for us a positive program. IT IS CLEAR however that the program of the New Man must make it impossible for people to declare in- ferior, as we have for so long, peoples like the Vietna- mese and the Afro-Americans. We have declared such peoples sub-human for the purposes of brutalizing and exploiting them. The most human in us says that all persons are entitled to the dignity of persons. To get around this, we have declared some- pesons are non- persons, that they can be made slaves and peons and treated with guns and whips. And as we set'about to make victims sub-human in our minds, we become sub- human ourselves. Pigs. And the dirty workers.took care of business so that many of us did not have to recognize all this. The generation of young pigs has been concerned with liberating the victims of the dirty worker pigs. But it is clear that it cannot liberate the victims until it lib- erates itself. This means confronting full force our own piggishness, which liberal/radicals have been so reluc- tant to do. LIBERAL/RADICAL PIGS, whose memories of hu- manity are the strongest of all pigs, have a history of working for victims rather than for themselves. As long as blacks allowed it, the civil rights worker acted in the ghetto, on behalf of the black victim. They marched at the front of the freedom march while blacks marched in the back and faced police brutality. The civil rights worker forcedr blacks to accept their skills and their values. And made it impossible for the victim to act for himself. Eventually blacks recognized the piggishness in the civil rights worker and drove them squealing from the black community. When they awoke, dazed, in the white community, the civil rights worker became apologists for Black Power. Their hearts - and perhaps their humanity -remained in the black ghetto. They spouted black power ideology and pretended to do black power work. Some, for example, referred to themselves as "Black Masks." All this was despite frequent declarations f r o m Stokely Carmichael and many other black men that the business of the expelled whites was to liberate the white community from its pig honkeyness. EVENTUALLY some whites began to explore the white community. But they were often overwhelmed with what they found, perhaps what they expected all along. The new white organizer found trustless, competetive and frightened "individuals" with no sense of humanity and no identification witlh a community. Ile found that whites defined themselves in terms of their salaries and possessions, that they could feel no bonds with anyone, except, in some cases, their immediate families. The white organizer had known something very dif- ferent in the black community. He had found that even the most politically estranged blacks, like Stokely Car- michael and Roy Wilkins, called each other "brother" and knew exactly what that meant. He found that black liberation workers felt "together" with black bourgeoisie, welfare mothers, and all the peoples of the Third World. And when the white organizer worked in the black com- munity, he flourished in that "togetherness" and exper- ienced himself as human. FOR WHEN A MURDERER kills a white leader, the "individuals" of the white community retreated back into feelings of "personal loss" and into talk of "deranged in- dividuals." But when a black is killed, an entire commun- ity takes the loss as that of theircommunity. As NAACP leader Albert Wheeler observed in the Martin Luther King memorial services in Hill Auditorium: whites felt grief; blacks felt anger. So, despite the agonies, white organizers with any memory of humanity at all must work to end the Circe spell on their comrades. When the white community can feel anger rather than "personal loss," perhaps it will be loss the community of pigs it is now. As Hermes told brave Ulysses, who only barely es- caped transfiguration, "Whither away again, you poor fellow, alone on the hills, in a country you do not know? Your companions are shut up younder in Circe's. like so many pigs, cosy in their pigsties. Are you going to set them free?' SO FREE THE PIGS. All the pigs. Until the pigs are freed, a band of whites who march to liberate a group of victims like the welfare mothers are only practicing self- deception. Fdr the dirty workers victimize the welfare mothers on behalf of the marchers and their community. Sure, the white solvers of the black problem may make some short term gains. But short-term gains are a large part of the spell of appeasement which keeps white liberal-radicals in their own particular sty. 'And sure, the-marchers can take orders from the welfare mothers. It is another path for the marchers into the togetherness of the black movement. And the op- pressed black women probably can't see the pig identified in the students who want to help them. They only see the pig in the dirty workers who act in the student's name. Lastly, sure the marchers can be attacked by police. There's nothing in the character of a pig which prohibits pigs from fighting among themselves. THE POLITICS of pig liberation will require whites to be very uncompromising in denying the seductions of the American system and its seducers. The white libe- rators will have to learn to stop being bought off with comforts and ad hoc solutions and to realize that educa- tions and jobs which do not directly work toward the emancipation of pigs only tightens the spell. Whites will also have to recognize, with a minimum of self-flagellation, who in America is a pig. "Ah, Circe," said Ulysses, "how could you bid me be gentle to you when you have turned my companions into pigs in this house? And now that you have me here, with decietfulness in your heart you bid me to go to your bed in your chamber, that when I am stript you may unman me and make me a weakling. "Ah Circe! What man with any decent feeling could have the heart to taste food and drink, until he should see his friends; free and standing before his eyes. If you really mean this invitation to eat and drink, set them free, that I may see my friends before my eyes." The martyr: Out of date?11 By DAVID DUBOFF "MARTYR: ONE WHO SACRIFICES his life, station, etc., for the sake of principle" (Websters New Col- legiate Dictionary, 2nd ed.). In this age where God is more dead than, he ever was, where the educated youth, frustrated by the stg- nation of a social order that feeds on human misery, are either "dropping out" Or retreating to a philosophy of political pragmatism, it is hardly surprising that the word "martyr" has become synonymous with "fool." '"What do you want to do, make a martyr of your- self?" people would say as I grappled with the decision of sitting-in for the second~ time. As though that ended the discussion. "Morality has no place in politics." AND YET, our generation, too, has its martyrs men public and private who have been killed defending their principles. How is it thatawee are able to idealize these "heroic figures" while condemning those we know in- finitely better who put themselves in positions where they may receive a few days or a few years in jail? We have become so imbedded in the atomic age's race to learn a skill and get out into the world value system that we have forgotten what a real principle is. A principled person is one who lives what he believes- or so our school books tell us. And if e is to live it, he must be prepared to die for it. Few men really intend to die for what they believe. And yet, Malc6lm X talked of a plot to assissinate him, and Martin Luther King, speaking the night before he died, had a premonition of danger. These men were charismatic figures, larger than life, and somehow, we are able to salve our consciences by remembering that they gave their lives to make this a better world. 4 V.. *4 4 $1 ' Letters to the Editor The bail fund: A lo gical explanation Excedrin headache No. 68 THE RECENTLY-APPOINTED Advisory Committee on Recreation, Intramurals and Club Sports, which met for the first time last Friday night, has inherited a long-standing headache. The committee, set up to directly in- fluence Athletic Director Don Canham, must address non-varsity athletic prob- lems which date bac: to the playing days of Bump Elliott. Last intramural facility added was the Margaret Bell Pool in 1953. Since then the enrollment of the University has doubled, putting increased pressure on existing facilities. The introduction of club sports like rugby, lacrosse, and soc- cer have hardly buffered the migraint. THE SHORTAGE of playing space , re- mains the most critical short-range issue. Because of a series of circum- stances neither Fuller Field (on North scheduling is crippled. Fuller, predicted to solve ,the o'verall shortage, is still lit- tered with stones. This limits the hoped-for expansion of, intramural teams. And the rugby :club, which has a home game scheduled for Saturday, has no home field (regulation- size). Recognizing the immediacy of the prob- lem, the committee's list of priorities in- cludes additional space for outdoor fields. THE AMBITIONS of the committee, though strictly limited to short-term proposals, are credible and laudable. Eventually it must square off with the fundamental issue of.updating student sport facilities congruent with student needs. But the committee's paramount road- block, in both short-term and long-term ..... - ew - wncrUn+U Ti, rnf- e . Pa.- To the Editor: WE ARE WRITING this letter with the hope that it will in some way clarify the misunder- standings and mitigate the re- sentment that seems to have arisen, in some quarters in regards to SGC's recent -establishment of a $1,500 bail fund. Bail money is held by the Court in the name of the person or or- ganization that posts the bond and is returned once the individ- ual has come to trial. It is in no way a payment of fine money, court costs, or payment of legal fees. It is a loan to a particular individual to enable him to await trial in his normal surroundings instead of a jail cell. This University has had a bail fund under Mr. Gainsley's office for several years. The amount of that bail fund was $200. The Stu- dent Relations Committee of SACVA had a study of that bail fund conducted because it was concerned whether or not this fund was sufficient. Last week it was demonstrated that it was totally inadequate. An amount of $200 is insuf- ficient for ,the normal needs of the student body even in times much calmerthan last weeks mass arrests. In light of this need, SGC contributed the first $1,500 ;to the bail fund. This amount was not merely for the situation of last Th -wc .l ", .- wi,,o h t . fn th than the relatively rareproblem of mass arrests resulting from demonstrations. THE CRITICISM has been, 'made that establishing a bail fund is inconsistent with the proper role of SGC. to this we would reply that the major portion of Council's budget has long been spent on services such as the Stu- dent Housing-Association. Student Consumer's Union, Legal Aid, voter registration, and other sim- ilar projects which attempt to provide needed service for stu- dents in their lives- outside 'he classroom. When students need an at- torney's advice in relation to their landlord, their insurance company, or other similar problem, SGC has provided lawyers on a low cost time sharing basis. Council has worked to provide service in ob- taining a fair shake for students in housing, prices, laundry facili- ties, registering in Ann Arbor, etc. because the need has existed and we could provide help. So when it beca'me obvious I hat a need, both immediate and long term,existed for bail so that stu- dent would not have their lives. both academic and non-academic, interrupted any longer than nec- essary while'awaiting trial, it was entirely consistent, in fact logical, that SGC continue its moves for- ward to serve the student com- munity. We hope that personal beliefs, both pro and con, about last week events will not prejudice the consideration of SGC's attempts to provide adequate bail funds to any student who needs it. -Robert Neff, Exec. V.P./SGC -E. O. Knowless, '70, SGC Sept. 10 SUPPOSEDLY, EACH OF THESE so-called martyrs was killed by a "crackpot," a sick man with a sick mind who placed value on human life. Those who sit-in to protest the corruption and degradation of the welfare system, those who go to jail every week for refusing induction, face a much worse enemy. They face an over- powering legal system that is every bit as corrupt, every bit as dehumanizing as the "crackpot" who made a hero out of RFK. People say, "You made your point when you got ar- rested. Why make things worse for yourself? After all, your fight isn't with the courts." Hogwash. The judicial system and law enforcement officials are integrally re- lated in a political power system used to stifle dissent and "keep dissidents in their place." Sheriff Harvey is able to throw a scare into demonstrators only because he has a system of legal sanctions to back him up. Thousands of our friends escape to Canada because they don't want to have to face five years in prison. We may not have the "right" under the system to break the law, but we have the duty, as human beings, to show that we will not allow the laws to be used to intimidate us. NO ONE MAKES A MARTYR out of himself. One does what he feels he has to do, and it is the people in power who decide how to respond to him. We should not allow ourselves to be voluntarily stif- led by the very middle-class value system that we say we are trying to oppose.)If 30 days in jail will make it impossible to stay in school this semester, we have the resources to go to school next semester. We should not be so self-righteous as to assume that if we were put out of circulation for 30 days the entire student movement would collapse. What is more important is that we continue to exist as human beings rather than as slaves to our dehuman- ized value system. There are two types of prisons, ones of steel bars, the other of fear and conciliation. A man can live in the first type of prison - perhaps not a full life, but nonetheless a meaningful one. The second is ulti- mately self-defeating, not only in personal terms but in '0 Alternatives to protests To the Editor: THE STUDENT demonstrations in Ann Arbor really made me laugh. Here were college kids who were contributing the least to the cause of ADC screaming the loud- est. I wonder how many of them have contributed to the cause as much as I and my fellow members of the working force have; my last paycheck of $224 was cut to $160 take home after taxes. needs. A group might take a bath, dress neatly and perhaps even cut their hair, and canvas the com- munity for clean used clothing, new clothing, or monetary con- tributions. (A dollar contributed by each student would,net a good beginning). Sub committees might volunteer their time to stay i with children so that mothers could get out to shop; others might volunteer their economic knowl- nr .r fi :hn wth -h , 1 ar c A4