Petitioning

The president of Scotch'n'Soda, Carnegie Mellon's student-run amateur theater association, sent an email out to the group's mailing list entitled "[Scotch'n'Soda]Your Help Needed". The email was not related to the group, though; it simply asked for any student interested in protesting Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's proposed tax, a 1% tuition tax on Pittsburgh students intended to fill a 15-million-dollar budget hole Luke had presumably noticed earlier. "This is where I ask you to come in," Scotch'n'Soda president Aaron Gross explained in his email. "I am personally appealing to you to lend a hand in this [protesting] process. Even if you can just give half an hour of your time next week to help gather signatures on a petition, you'll be making a measurable difference in Pittsburgh and in the lives of the students around you."

I decided to help in the effort on Wednesday, and offered my time from 3:30 pm until 4:00 pm; my last class ended at 3:20. When it came time to get the petition, I walked into the Student Activities in the UC. There, I signed out one of nine clipboards containing three or four petition sheets and a lot of little slips of paper detailing how to get involved past signing your name; these latter included information on which members of the legislature to sent letters and emails to, what addresses they might receive them at, and where to protest the tax further online.

For half an hour, I walked around the UC black chairs and upstairs rotunda area gathering signatures. Many people had already signed a petition, and several didn't want to, but the vast majority of the people I asked were enthusiastic to sign the petition. I ended up collecting around forty signatures, significantly less than I'd imagined, but I did have several good conversations with the other students. The petition had a box in which you could signify whether you'd be wiling to help out further by sending letters to senators and such, and another box asking if you'd like to collect petition signatures. While three out of the forty said "yes" to the former box, not a single one agreed to the latter prospect.

Two students asked if they could read the text of the petition. They wanted to know the specific wording it used and what it was about before appending their names to it. No other student bothered to read the petition; they all trusted me on what it stated, something both slightly comforting and slightly disconcerting.

One student, an Indian sophomore, asked me if he was allowed to sign the partition, not being a United States Citizen.

All in all, the experience was enlightening. I got to meet and have conversation with a fascinating diversity of students (although I did not approach any who were eating, deep in conversation, or on the phone) and to gather support for what I feel a worthy cause, or at least a fight against an unworthy cause. I hope I don't have want or occassion, after this tax falls through, to protest any other of Ravenstahl's proposals.