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CAMPUS LIFE
LSA hosts gathering to promote dialogue Following discovery of racially charged fliers, students show solidarity WILL FEUER
Daily Staff Reporter
CAROLYN GEARIG/Daily
School of Public Health student Rebecca Ahmad-Robinson and LSA sophomore Maya Green listen to other audience members speak during a debate on the Black Lives Matter movement held by the Michigan Political Union in the Michgian League on Tuesday.
Hundreds of students protest debate over merits of Black Lives Matter Nearly 400 protesters call for open dialogue at event NEIL SCHWARTZ Daily Staff Reporter
A debate Tuesday night sponsored by The Michigan Political Union came to an abrupt halt after hundreds of community members and University of Michigan students gathered outside the Michigan League’s Vandenberg Room to call for the inclusion of Black voices. The debate, which featured
members of MPU, was slated to discuss the merits of the Black Lives Matter Movement and whether it was “harmful to racial relations in the United States.” Social Work student Lawrielle West, one of the protest organizers, called the debate unacceptable because of its patronizing and diminutive focus. “You cannot trivialize my experience as a Black person by debating it,” she said. “How can you
debate my experience? I’m not saying I’m better than you or that only Black lives matter or that my life matters more than yours, but I’m saying that Black lives do matter.” The protest began at the Diag and marched toward the Michigan League, chanting phrases such as “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace.” As the crowd entered during the start of the debate, several protesters asked See DEBATE, Page 3A
AMANDA ALLEN/Daily
Social work student Lawrielle West leads Black Lives Matter Protesters in a march from the Diag to the Michigan Leauge where a debate on the movement was being held on Tuesday.
Daily election poll indicates New UM anti-Trump club forms on campus continued support for Clinton
GOVERNMENT
Survey suggests debate performance had low impact
In response to controversial statements, new group takes action CAITLIN REEDY Daily Staff Reporter
On his path to the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has both built a dedicated base in some parts of the population and noticeably isolated others. On the University of Michigan’s campus, a new club — Students Against Trump — has formed in response to Trump’s often controversial persona and words. During the election, Trump has created a persona built in large part on a tendency to stray from his scripted speeches, tweet on-the-spot and say whatever may be on his mind. Many of his supporters cite this as a positive, but others have also pointed to statements he’s made — such as proposing to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and to shutdown Muslim immigration into the country — as alarmingly offensive. Given that division, the new
student group’s main goal, the group says, is to stop Trump from reaching the White House. Bradley McPherson, LSA sophomore and president of Students Against Trump, said he felt the need to create an organization in response to the candidate last May, after it became clear Trump would be the likely Republican nominee. “Looking at Trump’s policies and his character, we thought we had to make a larger point against him,” McPherson said. “We thought we should speak out against all these factors and that culminated in the creation of the club.” Specifically, the club hopes to block people’s perception of Trump as a viable candidate for office. Both Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton have historically high unpopularity ratings among the national voting population — a recent ABC News/ Washington Post polling found that 56 percent of adults view See TRUMP, Page 8A
EMMA KINERY Daily News Editor
Though the first presidential debate drew wide interest on campus Monday night, that interest may not necessarily have equated to any changes in
voter preference, according to a Michigan Daily poll conducted directly after the debate. As part of an ongoing initiative to better gauge the campus political climate, The Michigan Daily sent out a poll to 1,500 students and received 302 responses. Eighty-one percent of
respondents said they watched the first presidential debate — the same percent of respondents also reported they will “definitely” vote in the upcoming election. The majority of students surveyed indicated that overall, Democratic presidential nominee See SURVEY, Page 3A
The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts hosted a gathering of more than 100 students, professors and advisers promoting solidarity against racism Tuesday night in response to racially charged posters found on campus Monday. Along with an announcement of the event, LSA Dean Andrew Martin released a statement supporting those students impacted by the incident Monday. “We stand with President Schlissel and University leaders in condemning the racist posters and flyers spread on campus today,” the statement said. “These posters advocating white supremacy strike at the very heart and soul of the College. Their presence marred our physical spaces—in Haven and Mason halls—where we hold our classes and where our faculty and staff work, and are an assault on everything we believe in as a liberal arts college and as a diverse community.” Tuesday evening, Martin said he wanted the event to be welcoming in nature, and hoped to foster reflection on the events from the last few days and, more broadly, the climate on campus for the last few years. See COMMUNITY, Page 3A
ELECTION
Anne Holton campaigns for Dems in Ann Arbor Former VA secretary of education makes campaign stops in Mich. LYDIA MURRAY Daily Staff Reporter
DYLAN LAWTON/Daily
Based on polling conducted by The Michigan Daily, a majority of students felt the debate did not have an influence on their vote.
Anne Holton, former Virginia Secretary of Education and wife of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, campaigned for Hillary Clinton Tuesday night in Ann Arbor after events in Detroit and Livonia. Holton visited the Ann Arbor campaign office, where she spoke to a primarily female audience — many of whom were local campaign volunteers or active community members — about the importance of mobilizing people to vote for Clinton in November. She planned to also make other stops in Michigan on See HOLTON, Page 3A
From military time to Michigan time The Statement explores the lives of veterans who enroll at the University and the challenges that they face.
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INDEX
Vol. CXXV, No. 143 ©2016 The Michigan Daily
NEWS......................... 2A OPINION.....................4A S P O R T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7A
SUDOKU.....................2A ARTS.................5A S TAT E M E N T. . . . . . . . . . . . 1 B
News
2A — Wedmesday September 28, 2016
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ON THE DAILY: VOTER REGISTRATION DAY Tuesday marked National Voter yet must do so by mail or in person, Michigan, visit the Michigan are registered to vote in the state of Registration Day. In Michigan, the not online. To check the specific Secretary of State’s website. Michigan, they can also check their last day to register to vote in the voter registration guidelines for If students are unsure if they registration status online. presidential election is Oct. 11 — a mere two weeks away. With 40 days until the election and 13 days until the voter registration deadline, voter mobilization efforts are in full swing around campus. Partisan voter registration efforts organized by the University of Michigan’s chapters of College Democrats and College Republicans will continue to take place in the Diag and Mason Hall. Nonpartisan initiatives, like Central Student Government’s Voice Your Vote registration drive, will launch efforts on Sunday to register students outside of each residence hall on campus. The initiative will conclude next Friday, Oct. 7. JEREMY MITNICK/Daily LSA senior Brendan Schroder and sophomore Sherilyn Foster of College Democrats register voters in the Diag on Those not registered to vote in Tuesday. the upcoming presidential election
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VOTE !
Lively, informative, funu talk by Catherine Cangany about her work on 18C #Detroit at @umich library this afternoon. Five stars. Angela Dillard @adillard4 Saddened, angered by racist, white supremcacist posters #umich. First response by @ProfADM on behalf of College
University announces start of preferred pronoun initiative The University of Michigan announced Tuesday that effective immediately, students will be able to indicate their preferred gender pronoun on class rosters. Provost Martha Pollack and E. Royster Harper, vice president for student life, said in an email to the campus community that a pronoun committee comprised of faculty and staff members has developed this process over the past year. A petition authored by Wolverines for Preferred Pronouns last March called for the
University to put pronoun preferences on class rosters, gaining 795 signatures. The email defined a preferred pronoun as a gender pronoun with which an individual would like to identify and expects others to use when referring to them. “Students can designate pronouns in Wolverine Access through the new Gender Identity tab within the Campus Personal Information section,” Pollack and Harper wrote in the email. “This page will be used to enter/update and/or delete pronoun information with the
University.” This change is considered part of the University’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiative, which will be fully launched on Oct. 6. Pollack and Harper also encouraged students and faculty to examine the rosters on Wolverine Access and be mindful of addressing people correctly. “Asking about and correctly using someone’s designated pronoun is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender
Michigan Students @UMichStudents
identities,” they wrote. “If you make a mistake and use the wrong pronoun, you can acknowledge that you made a mistake, and use the correct pronoun next time.” Students were encouraged to change their prefered pronoun before mid-to-late October because faculty members have been asked to review class rosters again at the end of the month and use the updated pronoun at that time for the remainder of the semester.
.@justinbieber I need u to know that my best friend Will and I choreographed a dance to #WhatDoYouMean that we prefected over the last year Michigan Tickets @umichtix
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We are officially SOLD OUT for Saturday’s @ UmichFootball game vs. Wisconsin
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Chelsea Clinton addresses students in national telephone conference
420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com
Call marks country-wide day of voter registration TIM COHN
Daily Staff Reporter
Chelsea Clinton spoke with students across the country in honor of National Voter Registration Day Tuesday, in a phone conference about the importance of millennial participation in the upcoming presidential election. Clinton, daughter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, stressed the significance of college communities in elections, saying millennialaged voters make up roughly 31 percent of the electorate. “We are in the middle of a big push to register people and get them to go out and vote,” Clinton said. “And I hope that last night’s debate demonstrated the clear contrast between my mom and
MAC & EASE.
her opponent, and demonstrated what is at stake this November.” After speaking about voter registration and the significance of voter mobilization, Clinton also fielded questions from students at universities across the country. Clinton first addressed a question about the differences between Hillary Clinton’s education policies and President Barack Obama’s. In her response, she said Obama does not receive enough credit for his education initiatives, also highlighting the ways Hillary Clinton aims to address education as a part of her platform. “There are several things that my mom wants to address in regards to education policy that would build off of President Obama,” Clinton said. “For example, she wants
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to enable anyone and everyone to index their loan payments as a percentage of their income so that nobody has to make a professional decision to service their debt.” During Obama’s terms, he instituted the “Pay as You Earn” plan to expand incomebased repayment — a plan that caps students’ monthly loan payments based on income and family size. The program lowers monthly payments and expands the length of the repayment period. A student on the call also asked Clinton about the best ways to motivate students to vote, given the large numbers of people who feel apathetic toward both major party candidates. In a recent Michigan Daily poll of a sample of students on campus, though respondents indicated overwhelming support for Hillary Clinton, 13 percent also indicated support for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, more than the support Trump received. “Voting is a very personal thing. ” Clinton said. “What I encourage you to do is ask people who are not inclined to vote is ‘What issues do you care about?’” This sentiment of voter apathy resurfaced when Clinton was asked about engaging former supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who feel disaffected and question whether Hillary Clinton is equally liberal. “My mom has offered the most progressive platform of a major presidential candidate ever,” Clinton said. “This is apparent when you look at her record fighting for children, fighting for more investment in public schools, fighting for criminal justice reform from her time as a young lawyer until now during her campaign.”
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SURVEY From Page 1A Hillary Clinton performed better in the debate, with 68 percent choosing Clinton, whereas Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump received 9 percent. A significant number of respondents — 18 percent — said neither candidate performed well. The Daily’s poll, however, showed that tuning into the debate didn’t necessarily equate to a change of preference. The majority — 59 percent — of respondents said the debate did not influence their vote, while 27 percent reported the debate somewhat influenced their vote and just 2 percent stated the debate greatly influenced their vote. Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, agreed with respondents that Clinton won the debate. However, he added that the lack of lasting influence the debate had on young voters could prove problematic for Clinton moving forward. “I think the main reason cutting into her support of younger voters are these third-party candidates and so debates are an excellent way for her to bring some of those
DEBATE From Page 1A the audience of about 50 students, “Do you want to hear what Black people have to say?” One of the protest organizers also led a calland-response chant, including the statement, “Your life is not up for debate, neither is mine.” The protest and debate came a day after racially charged posters were found in University buildings and around campus, which the University condemned in a statement Monday afternoon. A separate protest was held Monday night by students in response to the posters, and the College of Literature, Science and the Arts also hosted an event Tuesday night for students to discuss the fliers. LSA senior Joshua Strup, president of the MPU, said the group made the decision to hold its debate before the racially charged incidents that have occurred at the University and Eastern Michigan University this past week. However, he added that he still supported going forward with it. “We feel that it’s a disservice to the issue itself to shy away from it because of additional events that it deserves to be recognized, it deserves to be heard, it deserves to be discussed and to not do so would be a dismissive attitude,” he said. The protest had a mixed impact on the debate, halting parts, but not all of it. For several minutes after the protesters entered the event, debaters continued to speak, while protesters continued chanting. Shortly after the chanting began, a new MPU speaker took the podium and engaged with protesters, asking questions and discussing the issues at hand. Protesters then took to the podium directly, and spoke one by one to a mostly quiet crowd, when a disagreement broke out over whether white people should be speaking at the event. The protesters began leaving the room shortly afterward, chanting as they went, and effectively ending the debate. Standing outside the event while protesters were inside, University Spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said he thought it was positive that
COMMUNITY From Page 1A “I want each and every student here to know that you are welcome here, and we’re proud that you are here, and your faculty members and your staff that work with you on a daily basis are proud of you,” Martin said. After Martin’s remarks, the gathering was loosely structured, and invited students to engage in individual discussion with one another. While the flyers were a large part of the conversations, discussions also addressed broader topics of racism on campus and in society at large. LSA freshman Bailey DozierShabazz said she appreciated the opportunity to share her thoughts about the fliers. “It makes me feel a little bit unsafe, like I’m not even wanted here,” Dozier-Shabazz said. Students like LSA freshman
News
candidates into the fold,” Kall said. “But if she’s not talking about issues and subjects that relate to them and they either don’t vote or vote for a third party, then she could be in real trouble.” In the most recent survey of overall voter preference on campus conducted by the Daily on Sept. 18, 80 percent of respondents said they would vote for Clinton, while her primary opponent Trump received 9 percent when only given the choice of the major party candidate, with 11 percent voting “other.” In the poll of students after last night’s debate, the “other” not present on the stage had a stronger showing: 67 percent of students favored Clinton, 14 percent favored Trump, and 19 percent said “other,” though it is important to note that the sample for the post-debate poll was different than the sample for the Sept. 18 poll and the former had double the number of respondents. When asked which candidate has the better temperament to be president in the post-debate poll — something Trump repeatedly assured voters of during the debate — a majority chose Clinton over Trump, 75 percent to 7 percent respectively. Sixteen percent of respondents felt neither candidate has the temperament to be
president. In response to student favorability toward Clinton post-debate, Taiwo Dosunmu, communications director for University’s chapter of College Democrats, said he thought students had picked up on how well she performed and the qualities she possesses that would make her a better president than her opponent. “Last night’s debate showed how unfit Donald Trump is to be president,” Dosunmu said. “The students surveyed by the Daily saw this clearly, and they saw — just as clearly — how well Secretary Clinton performed. She was calm, cool and collected. She displayed the command of policy details we have come to expect from her, while being humorous, likable and confident. It should be no surprise that a majority of respondents listed Clinton as their choice for president.” In the Sept. 18 survey, students listed social issues, the economy and gun violence as the top three issues that mattered the most to them in this election — all of which were covered in the debate. The issue of college affordability, however, was only mentioned by Clinton briefly twice, and not by Trump at all.
protesters and event organizers were engaging each other. “As often happens on this campus, groups with different points of view find a way to get together,” he said. “The dialogue is really important. Listening as well as talking are important for both sides on this campus.” Many protesters and audience members, however, said though the two groups had been in the same room, not much open dialogue had occurred. LSA sophomore Allison Hellman, a MPU member, said she did not feel the protesters respected the decorum of debates, which resulted in four of the intended speakers not having the opportunity to speak. “I thought the protest was fine,” she said. “I thought the initial coming in and saying their piece was fine. I had an issue with once they had said what they were supposed to, what they were going to say, continuing to impede civil discourse.” LSA junior Corey Walker, who was an audience member, said after the event that he also did not support the disruptive nature of the protest. “I am Black, so yeah, I want to make life for myself and my family better,” Walker said. “At the same time, I don’t necessarily think that their tactics are going to get us there simply because when you do things like what they did today, like shut down any type of discussion whatsoever, not being willing to listen, interrupting people, discounting facts, screaming and yelling in people’s faces, using profanity, trying to silence people’s voices, it doesn’t move the ball forward.” Walker added that he felt the Black Lives Matter movement often follows this format, calling it unproductive to achieve long term goals. “As demonstrated here today, I don’t think this movement is about bridging gaps or actually finding solutions to problems; I think it’s about people who have a specific agenda screaming and yelling, which is fine,” he said. “But in order to make progress, you have to set specific policy goals in order to think about what you want.” LSA freshman Na’kia Channey,
who spoke at the protest, said she wished more dialogue had occurred between audience members and protesters. Citing the disagreement that broke out over whether white students should have been able to talk during the protest, she said she thought the white students should have been allowed to ask relevant questions about the purpose of the protest and Black Lives Matter as a whole. This, she added, is important for allies to understand the movement. “I know white people have questions about Black Lives Matter,” she said. “And though they can look stuff on the internet, I think it makes sense that we let them ask questions so we can tell them why they need to support our movement.” However, she also noted the importance of incorporating Black voices in the conversation. “I totally agree that Black voices need to be listened to,” she said. “It’s very important that when our narrativism is endured so often that we need people to finally listen to what we say.” LSA junior Chanice Taylor, secretary of the Michigan chapter of the NAACP, said before the march she believes their actions were important as they attracted attention to racist events affecting the Black community on campus. “I’m here to show my support and bring awareness that these things do happen on campus,” she said. “Although we are making strides as far as diversity, we still have a long way to go.” Eastern Michigan University seniors Cina Webster and Kaya Mills also said they joined the protest because they thought the debate signified the need to raise awareness about these issues among the student body. “Tonight showed that there is a ton of ignorance,” Webster said. “Willful ignorance.” “This is only the first step,” Mills said. “We have to continue doing things like this, we can’t stop. Because if we stop, then they think ‘Oh they’re satisfied.’ But we’re still dying.” Daily Staff Reporter Will Feuer and Daily News Editor Jackie Charniga contributed reporting to this article.
Carlena Toombs attended the event looking for answers as to how the University would respond to the fliers. “I came to the event just to observe how exactly LSA plans to deal with the issues such as the racist flyers, because I love the University of Michigan, but I’m still having trouble finding what is the place of the Black students here,” Toombs said. While Toombs said she appreciates steps taken by the University, she added that the response was not entirely in line with what the Black campus community wants. “I feel like it’s very hard for (the administration) to do what we, Black students, want them to do, but, at the same time, I appreciate them allowing things like protests to go on, which I feel like is as much as they really can do, politically,” Toombs said Reginald Hammond Jr., student administrative assistant at the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, said
he thinks the event was a strong beginning to a greater movement on campus. “This is the beginning of discussions, of building a culture where people feel comfortable expressing how they feel and being in a place with other people who are unlike them who embrace their differences,” Hammond said. LSA sophomore Chanelle Davis said the flyers were an attempt to hijack the Black experience of oppression. “It was offensive to me as a Black person, because I feel like people like that often try to take away from what we as Black people or we as people of marginalized identities try to do: get the world to understand why we are oppressed,” Chanelle said. “And I feel like we try to have the conversation a lot and for them to portray things like they’re the ones being attacked, that they’re the ones not being able to be who they are freely is not accurate — it’s not fair to us.”
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 — 3A
AR AB WORLD POLITICS
ARNOLD ZHOU/Daily
Amr Moussa, an Egyptian politician and former Egypt Foreign Minister, explains the current status of the Arab world in a talk hosted by the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies in the School of Social Work Tuesday.
HOLTON From Page 1A Wednesday in East Lansing and Grand Rapids. Holton’s visit follows a recent one from Kaine, who came to campus two weeks ago, and precedes a Friday event in Novi featuring Republican nominee Donald Trump. In her remarks, Holton highlighted the importance of grassroots campaigning, and repeatedly asked the audience to continue to volunteer and encourage people in their lives to vote for Clinton. “I’m going to talk about you,” she said. “You are the key to this election. You all know that, right? You all know Michigan is often the key to the national election.” Mai Le, an attendee and Ann Arbor resident, said she found Holton’s message reassuring. “I really think me and everyone in this room really want to see a Clinton campaign victory on November 8th,” she said. “Hearing how directly we are making a difference for the campaign was very inspiring.” Over the past few decades,
Michigan has been a blue state, except for a victory by President Ronald Regan in 1988. However, the GOP has dominated statelevel politics over the past few years, and Trump has stated he wants to flip Michigan several times. Nonetheless, Clinton has maintained a lead in the state against Trump throughout the election season. The most recent RealClearPolitics polling average shows Clinton leading by 4.7 points. After the event, Holton repeated her emphasis on volunteering in an interview with The Michigan Daily, saying Michigan could determine the outcome of the election on a national scale. “Michigan is a battleground state,” she said. “It always is like Virginia is. It’s just so important. We are fighting for votes everywhere. If Michigan supports Hillary Clinton, the nation will support Hillary Clinton, and she will be our next president.” Students on campus have been actively involved in the election with organizations like the University of Michigan’s chapter of College Democrats hosting a series of voter
registration drives. Additionally, the first Michigan Daily election survey indicated overwhelming support for Clinton among a sample of students. Holton told the Daily she believes the student vote is valuable in the presidential race, but even more so in state and local elections. “I’m really thrilled to hear that students are involved in the top of the ticket, but also we’ve got great candidates up and down the ticket,” she said. “Our students don’t always fully engage in those races … The student vote can really make a difference for that and it can really make a difference for the top of the ticket too. Students are our future, and when they participate, Democrats win.” Ann Arbor resident Jane Campbell, an event attendee, said she believes candidates visiting the state indicates the significance of this election. “It’s really important to see the major candidates and their surrogates here in Michigan, so that people can understand the seriousness of the election,” she said. “I do not understand how anyone cannot vote in this or any election.”
AMELIA CACCHIONE/Daily
Anne Holton, former Virginia Secretary of Education and wife of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, speaks to volunteers and audience members at the Hillary Clinton office in Ann Arbor Tuesday.
Opinion
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4A — Wednesday, September 28, 2016
LAUREN SCHANDEVEL | OP-ED
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VICTORIA NOBLE AND BEN KELLER | OP-ED
This November, vote nation over party
E
arlier this year, George Will, the championed conservative columnist, announced he was leaving the Republican Party. “The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me,” Will responded to a shocked press. Reduced to an outsider within his own political family, Will evoked the father of modern conservatism to try and explain away his position. We, too, are distraught Republicans, and have both served on the executive board for the University of Michigan’s chapter of College Republicans in the past. But for us, supporting Donald Trump means abandoning our core principles of limited government, individual freedom and strong international leadership. Trump’s candidacy has left us and many other life-long Republicans with the vexing choice of voting for a candidate who is clearly unfit for the office or defying years of party loyalty. We believe in putting our nation over party identity. Nevertheless, not all of our Republican-minded friends feel the same way we do. Two weeks ago, UMCR officially endorsed Mr. Trump and announced its intention to partner with Trump’s national campaign. We respect UMCR’s decision to support Trump and its right to make that decision. If anything, the 2016 campaign has lacked the basic decency that should exist in any election — for the most part, voters’ opinions must be respected and left open for discussion. After all, if we expect any societal shift toward healthy debate to occur, then we must begin to ease the tense disapproval we place on those who oppose our personal viewpoints. But while we respect the decision, we cannot support it. As former UMCR members, we are writing this column to other students who may find themselves similarly caught in the awkward position between loyalty and voting according to what their conscience tells them. We urge you to do the latter. UMCR President Enrique Zalamea’s comment to the Michigan Review that “any Republican is better than Hillary Clinton” seems to exemplify many Republicans’ attitudes this election. But to us, it is far from clear that Mr. Trump can accurately be
described as “Republican” in any way but nominally. His nomination was secured with about 56 percent of the popular vote in the primaries when just 14.8 percent of eligible voters participated — numbers that hardly imply the blessing of the party’s constituents. Trump has never held office as a Republican and has, in the past, actually donated to Clinton’s campaigns. And while we take issue with many of Clinton’s policy proposals and high-profile episodes of impropriety, we have major concerns about the long-term impact of a Trump presidency on the United States. Trump has spent months trying to convince voters to let him “make America great again,” but his policies would likely produce the opposite outcome. Trump blames both free trade agreements and low interest rates for the state of the economy — a state he seems to believe is much worse than it actually is. But dismantling the international trade laws that have governed peaceful global commerce since the end of World War II or raising interest rates prematurely risk throwing the U.S. economy into another recession. And despite an emphasis on national security, Trump threatens our country’s safety through incendiary remarks and feckless “policy” proposals that scapegoat entire ethnicities, nationalities and religions for failures of international governance and unintended consequences of war. Trump demonstrates an alarming misunderstanding of foreign affairs and heaps praise on dictators while admonishing prisoners of war. In August, 50 former senior security officials publicly declared their unwillingness to support Trump, a candidate who, in their view, put the entire country’s security “at risk.” Above all, Trump has transformed our once cherished, civil, issues-focused process of selecting elected officials into a sideshow circus scene bent on increasing entertainment value and spreading fear and anxiety throughout the public. The laundry list of concerns is seemingly unending: He poses a severe risk to global economic stability by way of his inexplicable comments on debt, trade, taxes and alliances; he exacerbates social tensions throughout the United States by pitting cultures and races against one another; his amateurish understanding of international conflicts and
the rules of engagement are startling for a major presidential candidate; his overall vulgarity, crassness and egotism all affect his standing among world leaders and private American citizens alike, which hinders our ability to advance foreign and domestic interests. Disregarding these obvious red flags, endorsements of Trump consistently paint him as a change agent who will be restrained by a powerful team of advisers and cabinet members. Unfortunately, this optimistic view is only a fool’s paradise. If Mr. Trump chooses his cabinet as he has chosen his campaign team — which has included a former consultant to a Ukrainian autocrat and a man who was once charged with domestic violence — then the prospects for any sort of restraint are doomed. As for Trump’s role as a change agent, it is unfathomable to expect someone with zero political experience and a flagrant disregard for the truth or facts of any situation to bring about the type of change necessary to fix our country for the better. We need someone who can bring opposite sides together. Donald Trump cannot do this. We need someone with the mental fortitude to stick by their core policy beliefs and compromise when necessary. Donald Trump cannot do this. We need someone who will represent peace to our neighbors and diplomacy to those who oppose us. Donald Trump cannot do this. We need a proven, level-headed, open-minded individual who recognizes the principles that built this nation from nothing into a superpower. Who we need is categorically the antithesis of Donald Trump. The future looks considerably bleak for Republicans of our stripe. We still ascribe to the ideas that guided our party through the centuries, beginning with Lincoln, and we need candidates who will carry this tradition once again — Donald Trump will not. It is tough to be optimistic in such an uncertain and frustrating political climate. However, we cannot give up the efforts to ease the strangling tension within the country. Our goal now will be to move forward supporting responsible candidates with sensible policies, resisting the forces that seek to undo us. Victoria Noble is a columnist and Ben Keller is a senior opinion editor at The Michigan Daily.
MICHELLE SHENG | CONTACT MICHELLE AT SHENGMI@UMICH.EDU
B
The truth about class
ear with me for this metaphor. Imagine you have two seeds. You plant one seed in a sunny patch of nutrient-rich soil and water it every day. You plant the other seed in a dark shed and neglect it for months. Not surprisingly, the first seed grows tall and healthy while the other does not. Can you attribute the success of the first seed or the failure of the second to any inherent quality? Of course not; you provided the conditions, which produced the results. Now imagine two children. One child grows up in a safe, affluent neighborhood and attends an excellent school, where they are encouraged to pursue their interests and given the resources necessary to do so. The other child grows up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood and attends a school with crumbling infrastructure, a poor student-to-teacher ratio and a shortage of even the most basic resources. The first child goes on to graduate from a renowned university and pursue a lucrative career that allows them to raise their children in an area similar to the one in which they grew up. The second child, on the other hand, does not graduate from high school and instead works a low-wage job and remains in their neighborhood, where they raise their children in precisely the same conditions. Can we attribute the success of the first child or the perceived failure of the second to any inherent quality? Of course not; as with the seeds, we provided the conditions, which produced the results. If the rationale of our metaphor holds, then why do we still operate under the assumption that one’s socioeconomic status is the product of one’s character? More specifically, why do we act
as though poverty and wealth are deliberate choices, rather than phenomena created and perpetuated by a rigidly stratified class system? For decades, we have blissfully and collectively operated under the assumption that America is a fruitful meritocracy where all dreams, no matter how ambitious, can be achieved with just the right amount of hard work and determination. This is the foundation on which our country was built, and its blind optimism resonates today with the same magnitude that it did more than 200 years ago. Our country’s elite are lauded for their competence while our poor are degraded for their deficiencies, all while those of us making the observations remain grossly unaware of how exactly our system works to maintain these inequalities. Here is a bitter pill to swallow: America is an oligarchy in which a handful of (primarily wealthy and white) citizens inherit automatic and unlimited access to elite academic institutions, political influence and positions of power. Poor people and people of color are not left out because they do not have what it takes to thrive — they are left out because we never intended for them to thrive in the first place. Now you may be asking yourself: “What about all of those inspiring stories I’ve heard in which someone who comes from next to nothing manages to succeed despite all odds?” The answer lies within the question. These individuals are exceptions — not in the sense that they did not earn their success (if anything, they are especially deserving of it), but rather that their systemic disadvantage made the probability of their success far lesser than their more affluent counterparts. Nevertheless, the myth of the
American Dream demands a sacrifice, and these individuals are subsequently tokenized and heralded as examples of the culmination of hard work and “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.” We parade them in front of their communities as if to say: “You could achieve the same results, you just didn’t work hard enough.” So I’ll revisit the metaphor: If a seed grows in a dark room, is it viewed as a miracle or an expectation? Think about it. We are conditioned to believe that our every accomplishment is the product of our character alone rather than a combination of character and circumstance, of the resources we are given and the ways in which we utilize them. Not only does this mentality perpetuate the notion that the wealthy are inherently superior; it allows us to live comfortably in the presence of extreme poverty by blaming the poor for their own misfortunes. If we can confront our perceptions of class head-on, work diligently to undo our inherited biases and unite to strengthen and elevate one another in a way that is productive and decent, then we can successfully develop solutions to the flaws in our system that threaten to divide us. What are the consequences of allowing all of our seeds to grow in ideal conditions? Are we afraid some will crowd out others, that there is not enough sunlight and water to go around? Do we feel threatened by the prospect of equal opportunity? What will become of our garden? I’ll tell you what will happen: It will grow bigger and more beautiful than ever before. Lauren Schandevel is an LSA sophomore.
MICHAEL SUGERMAN | COLUMN
A
Ignorance can be overcome
s a 3-year-old, I had a Knowing my family story, polarizing incident of and having awareness of the accidental racism. cyclical persecution of Jews We had been learning about over thousands of years, there Martin Luther King Jr. and the was a time where I felt defensive civil rights movement about being called during Black History out for “white Month in preschool. privilege” because So, when my dad ran I was reluctant into one of his close to let my current business colleagues societal standing (a longtime local civil supplant a much more rights leader) one complicated history day, I asked a poorly that is such a big part phrased albeit wellof my identity. intentioned question Ultimately, though, MICHAEL it’s important to for which I still feel guilt: “Dad, we’re SUGERMAN understand that supposed to be nice to there is a difference Black people, right?” between generalizing white My parents believe firmly in culture (and its numerous ethnic, racial equality, and my Jewish socioeconomic, etc. backgrounds) roots tie me in many ways to and recognizing that the mere the civil rights movement (more appearance of whiteness is a on this later). My dad was so safeguard in and of itself. embarrassed. He apologized We shouldn’t shy away from profusely to his friend and then acknowledging “white privilege” made sure I understood that, — it exists. It is our responsibility, of course, all people were to be then, to be an ally to those whose treated with the same level of voices aren’t as easily heard. We respect, regardless of their skin must employ our privilege to color. I shouldn’t have had to ask. share their perspectives when Children’s minds are they don’t have a platform to do malleable. It was that easy to so, until the time comes when change the way I spoke about and that’s no longer necessary. This is understood race. admittedly easier said than done. *** *** Too often, I think, white My only excuse for my 3-yearpeople feel defensive when old folly is innocent, accidental they’re called out for “white ignorance. However, that privilege.” Many feel they’re ignorance is something I was being guilted for something almost immediately coached totally beyond their control. I get out of, and it’s a mistake I revisit it. I’ve been there. “White” is such somewhat often, most recently a broad word that doesn’t capture after fliers that directly targeted the wide swath of backgrounds people of color were posted in it represents — the U.S. Census Mason Hall. classifies “white” as “a person One sheet explained “Why having origins in any of the White Women Shouldn’t Date original peoples of Europe, the Black Men,” and another called Middle East, or North Africa.” for “Euro-Americans” to stop As someone who is both “apologizing,” “living in fear” culturally and religiously and “denying your heritage.” “BE Jewish, my life of privilege WHITE,” the latter read. growing up stems directly from There is no excuse for the fliers the struggle of my people. My posted on our campus. There is great-grandparents left the no excuse for people who not only hardship and pogroms of Poland remain willfully and aggressively and Russia shortly before the ignorant, but also encourage and Holocaust, and my grandfather espouse ignorance. grew up poor in Staten Island to Very rarely, if ever, do children immigrant parents who spoke ask if it is OK to “be nice to” a Yiddish and alongside more white person. I can’t imagine how traditionally American “white my dad’s friend must have felt to people” who beat him up for hear a 3-year-old kid ask that. being a “dirty Jew.” Very rarely, if ever, do white
people sincerely fear for their lives when they get pulled over by a police officer. My parents don’t worry I’ll be killed if I’m caught running a stop sign. Very rarely, if ever, based on Intergroup Relations training I’ve done as a student at this University, do white people get asked where they’re “from, from” as if their home state must not be their place of official origin. If there’s one thing that I’d like people to learn from 3-yearold me, it’s that ignorance and insensitivity to others’ experiences can be overcome. A lesson I’ve picked up from my peers in the last few years regarding issues of identity, from race to religion to gender, is that it’s OK to feel uncomfortable, and it’s OK if you don’t know someone else’s life experiences — provided that you make an effort to educate yourself. Ask the questions you think might be stupid. Stumble upon a microaggression, but understand when someone reacts adversely and listen to them explain why what you’ve said is hurtful. Listen. Listen to others’ perspectives, and if you can’t empathize, sympathize. And when the time comes, spread your newfound knowledge to the people who stand where you once did. I want to be optimistic. My hypothesis is that ignorance sprouts from any combination of misunderstanding, resistance to change or even fear of that which seems unknown or different, and my hope is that we can help those with fear or even indifference in their hearts understand and acknowledge their unfounded biases in an effort to subvert even the most poisonous of thoughts. At a time when racial disparities in this country are so much more complex and nuanced than 50 years ago, yet simultaneously just as pronounced — and a time when racial and cultural division seems to be growing — it is important that people of all colors speak out and unite to work through our problems together. I believe in us.
Michael Sugerman can be reached at mrsugs@umich.edu.
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
FILM NOTEBOOK
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 — 5A
ALBUM REVIEW
FOCUS FEATURES
“As you can see here, we’re very lost.”
A completionist’s story: an artistic confession
Starting with the complete works of Wes Anderson, one writer learns not all works by great artists are great DANIEL HENSEL Daily Arts Writer
Completionism: the act of consuming all works by an artist, film director or musician. Here is a completionist’s confession: I have refrained from watching films I knew would be good because I hadn’t watched their directors’ previous films. The same is true for albums and bands. I have, conversely, watched countless films I was 99 percent sure would be terrible beforehand (and those predictions were mostly right). I suppose my obsession with completion goes back to “Moonrise Kingdom,” the 2012 film by Wes Anderson, which was the movie that got me into movies. When I was younger, my form of rebellion against my parents was to reject their offers to watch movies with them in theaters or on home video. Unfortunately for me, my mother studied film in college, so her film literacy and taste have struck me as superlatively impressive since I developed an interest in film. In other words, I missed out. But when I saw a trailer for “Moonrise Kingdom,” a twee love story between two young troubled teenagers on a New England island in the summer of 1965, my interest in film blossomed. I never acted on the desire — the demands of my high school debate schedule proved to be too much of an obstacle — but “Moonrise Kingdom” remained in the back of my mind, waiting to be serviced. About a year later, in my senior year of high school, the film started appearing on television and I recorded it. Upon watching that fateful recording, I understood like
never before how films could be so transforming. As soon as the film finished, I scoured the internet for all of Wes Anderson’s other films. For a few days before first semester finals, I locked myself in my room and watched all his works — “Rushmore” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” made particular impressions on me — all while remaining keenly aware that a new film of his, “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” was due to be released in a few short months. I became obsessed.
There’s a certain joy in truly knowing a director. That directorial deep dive has never left me. In the years since, captivated by a singular film and determined to watch the director’s remaining filmography, I have watched the works of Steven Spielberg, Noah Baumbach, the Coen Brothers, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen and countless others. There’s a certain joy in truly knowing a director. Freed from the blind spots of one’s neophyte friends, the completionist can trace the styles, subjects and collaborators of directors from small, hobbled-together debut to peak artistic craft (note: usually, but certainly not always, around the third or fourth film), to lateperiod gem. There are, of course, shortcomings. Not all films by a director — even some of the best directors — are good. There’s a lot of suffering in dedication.
But those who find themselves in a deep dive can find something to love in any film by a director to whom they commit themselves. I don’t particularly love “The Darjeeling Limited,” a mediocre film by Wes Anderson, but its style adds to the broader tapestry of Anderson’s twee works and his oeuvre would probably be worse without it. And I suppose it starts earlier: my first art love was architecture and it still captivates me today. Growing up in the environs of Chicago, an architectural mecca, I was exposed to countless works by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. A life goal of mine is to see every Frank Lloyd Wright building ever built (and still in existence). I’ve adapted the deep dive to music, too. Over the summer, my boss, in a company meeting, referenced Neil Young, and then looked at me and asked, in an apparent slight to my age, “Do you even know who Neil Young is?” I do in fact know who Neil Young is, but I couldn’t name any songs by him or Buffalo Springfield. As much as I claim to love the rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s and 1970s, I’m clearly missing many key names. I decided to listen to the discographies of all the artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I started in June with Chuck Berry, moved into James Brown and now I’m working through Ray Charles. It’s taking forever: three artists over four months. And yet, it’s been fruitful. These are legends, individuals whose work changed music forever. Art is a cyclical phenomenon of copying, inspiration and innovation. We owe it to ourselves to experience the enlightenment of discovery. The best place to start is with the masters.
FILM REVIEW
SUP POP
This looks like every all male indie band we’ve reviewed in the last five years.
Four member indie band LVL UP ‘Returns to Love’ on third album ‘Returns’ finds itself between fuzz-infused punk and lo-fi subtley SEAN LANG
— he’s now a permanent fixture in the band — though he doesn’t write any of the material. The Every once in awhile, a other three split song-writing band will release an album responsibilities roughly evenly, whose cover art is more than which is surprising given the impressive. Rather than simply generally cohesive nature of putting a pretty picture to a their work together. Now, collection of songs, it profoundly following 2014’s breakthrough influences Hoodwink’d, Return the listening to Love finds LVL experience. UP crafting the most Perhaps fleshed out, lyrically it invites, complex material Return to Love intrigues or they’ve released to LVL UP just mystifies. date. In the best of Opening on single Sup Pop cases, it evokes “Hidden Driver,” an emotional the influence of response from ’90s fuzz-folk the listener is immediately before the music even starts. apparent; one almost expects Whatever the exact case may Jeff Mangum to jump in with a be, Return to Love is one of nasally “two-headed boy” after those albums. Illustrated in the opening chords. LVL UP’s immensely satisfying detail lyrics are also just as inscrutable and contained by a thick white as Mangum’s always were. For border, the cover’s naturescape a brief taste: “Hidden driver / is a crucial, almost necessary forming shape inside my chest introduction to the album. / omnipotent in the way that it Invoking nature and, by arrests / every sense and every extension, solitude, it primes lesson.” The exact meaning the listener for an experience of these opening lines doesn’t centered on self-discovery. ever become particularly clear, At the same time, the pure but the song finds the band whiteness that surrounds grappling with the idea of god — this image indicates a crisp, God? — and the biblical Fall. aesthetically intelligent quality, While fuzz permeates the setting a standard that the album, some tracks are also music itself surely matches. characterized by touches of On Return to Love, LVL synthesizer. An absolute master UP’s third studio album and class on restraint, the playful first for Sub Pop, the four- synth line that comes in at the piece outfit finds a highly two-minute mark (and only rewarding medium between appears twice) on “She Sustains fuzz-infused punk bombast and Us” is a testament to LVL UP’s lo-fi subtlety. After meeting at arguably newfound maturity. SUNY Purchase in New York, This synth in particular, as well Mike Caridi, Dave Benton and as other artificial sounds that Nick Corbo joined forces as LVL crop up here and there — the UP and introduced themselves sample that opens the track, for to the world on 2011’s quietly example — also add an exciting, released Space Brothers, an almost genre-defying dimension album comprised almost to the band’s overall vibe. entirely of quick in-and-out jams Despite all of the change — its 13 tracks clock in at just or deviation from previous over 23 minutes total. Drummer direction that characterizes Greg Rutkin joined them on tour Return to Love, longtime
fans need not be in dismay! Fuzz permeates, but refuses to dominate, and tracks like “Cut from the Vine” find more of the clean, singular guitar melodies that largely defined their previous releases. What’s more, the band members’ voices haven’t changed a bit. Still the perfect complement for their guitar-driven brand of quasipunk, their voices are never particularly urgent, and remain constant while the guitars set the emotional tone. Bordering on monotone, LVL UP’s laid-back, gently lilting vocals bring a casual quality to an album whose thematic content could be considered anything but. Here, LVL UP confront the idea of a higher being on “Hidden Driver” and condemn someone who has recently betrayed a friend to “grow old and never find love.” In addition to covering all of the usual bases of indie lo-fi alt-rock, the band has widened their focus, singing beyond just their own distinctly personal experiences. They continue to embrace individuality, but have contextualized it with the knowledge of a much greater, much more significant and unpredictable unknown. The idea of a singular, omnipotent deity appears not only on “Hidden Driver”—see “Naked in the River with the Creator” and “Cut from the Vine — and could reflect the instability ubiquitous in recent years for the four New Yorkers. In interviews, they have said that they decided they would be going their separate ways if things didn’t come together. Thankfully, signing to Sub Pop seems to have had more of a humbling effect than an ego-inflating one. In small print — at the bottom of the aforementioned album cover, beneath the river, the mountains and the entirety of the lush landscape — are two words: “Thank you.”
from eager to finance an elderly- of Pixar’s “Up.” However, unlike focused movie anytime soon. “Up,” “Max Rose” fails to come Jerry Lewis’s (“The Nutty even close to as heartbreaking. Professor”) career spans over His granddaughter Annie, half a century. From his work lackadaisically played by Kerry in the ’50s with Bishé (“Argo”), Dean Martin to takes care of his philanthropy, Max despite his Lewis has been stubbornness. The one of the most movie revolves “Max Rose” prolific comedians. around Lewis Michigan Theater Today — although trying to construe few 20-something clues of his wife’s Paladin year olds are fans infidelity 50 years — his name is still ago. This plotline relevant. feels meaningless “Max Rose”, and does nothing to written and directed by Daniel deepen the love Max Rose felt for Noah (“A Girl Who Walks Home his wife. Rather, viewers spend at Night”), stars Lewis as the the entire time wondering why he titular character, a 90-year-old even cares about this past scandal widower struggling through day- since his wife has just died. to-day life. Lewis ventures away The performances in “Max from comedy to more serious Rose” are the most painful territory here, and his fans will feature. Lewis tries to express be disappointed by the result. Max’s depression and mourning, The movie premiered at Cannes but it never feels believable. The in 2013, though it only recently dialogue only fuels the poor gained wide distribution. What acting; every sentence feels happened during these three forced and unnatural, and every years in between is unknown; statement is overly dramatic, as unfortunately, “Max Rose” if it were a part of a speech. His should have never made it past son, Christopher (Kevin Pollak, Cannes. “A Few Good Men”), is especially The movie begins with guilty of supplying the worst a montage of sentimental lines, with small talk that feels flashbacks of Max’s recently like something overheard on an deceased wife that’s meant to awkward first date. His deliveries tug at the viewer’s heartstrings, are so unrealistic that it’s always similar to the opening sequence clear that he is, in fact, acting in
front of a camera with a film crew behind him. “Max Rose” feels half-baked at best, almost like Noah failed to make a deadline in its production. Its plot is choppy and its acting feels like it was barely rehearsed. Even with fine tune-ups, it is unlikely that “Max Rose” would ever be a successful movie; it would take an entire overhaul. Max Rose, the character, lacks any redeeming qualities, so much so that I hope no one I know ages like him. The movie does nothing to comment on the pains of getting old and portrays elders as stubborn and unpleasant, characteristics that should not be the only takeaways. There is no authentic development between Max’s family, and his friendships feel unrealistic. If “Max Rose” was trying to increase empathy toward elders, it failed. “Max Rose” is nothing but a brief glitch in Lewis’s expansive career. As a comedian with a plethora of material, the movie will be quickly forgotten in his legacy. Considering that this could be one of Lewis’s last performances, viewers and fans will want to like it, but it isn’t worth pretending. Liking “Max Rose” only because Lewis is old is purposeless; fans will always be able to revisit their favorite material and enrich their lives with laughter.
Daily Arts Writer
B+
D
PALADIN
“How does my breath smell?”
Jerry Lewis doesn’t defend his icon status in 2013’s bland ‘Max Rose’ After premiering at Cannes, the film finally receives wide release WILL STEWART For the Daily
Movies about the elderly and teenagers are hard to get right. When they are successful, however, it feels even more
rewarding. With elders, there are inevitable biases that explain why movies starring older actors (besides Michael Caine, Meryl Streep or Morgan Freeman) are less common. Essentially, viewers would rather watch young,
beautiful actors in roles that don’t remind us of our impending death (or inevitable wrinkles). Jerry Lewis attempts to negate this with his performance in “Max Rose.” Sadly, any producer who sees the movie will be far
Arts
6A — Wednesday, September 28, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
SOCIAL MEDIA COLUMN
TV REVIEW
Finstas and Thirst Traps: Deconstructing virtual identity SAM ROSENBERG
Daily Social Media Columnist
ABC
“I’m now realizing we’ll never be ‘How to Get Away With Murder.’ “
‘Notorious’ is far from Shondaland’s elite work
New ABC drama misses the opportunity to be something good DANIELLE YACOBSON
breaking stories. Jake and Julia, characters that creator Josh Burman (“Drop Dead Diva”) based on Fall TV season is here, and with celebrity attorney Mark Geragos it comes the return of series with and “Larry King Live” producer vague, dramatic, one-word titles. Wendy Walker, write a narrative Turn on “Scandal” absent of ethics, or “Revenge,” and morals and integthe next 40-some rity. Sexy, right? minutes will, Wrong. The without doubt, series kicks off “Notorious” be filled with with a pilot that Pilot blackmail, notstuffs in one preso-secret affairs dictable twist after Thursdays at 9 p.m. and, if we’re lucky, another, throwing ABC a mysterious originality out the disappearance. window and setWhile these hightling for less than drama shows mediocre. All the border on ridiculous, they do boxes for “just another network promise to be entertaining. At the drama” are neatly checked off: very least, they should deliver on the high-profile murder, the some good, old-fashioned, heart- unprofessional affair, the threatwrenching angst, however ABC’s ening blackmail. The “surprisnew drama series “Notorious” ing” developments come and falls short of even the bare go so fast that any semblance minimum. of anticipation or heat simmers “Notorious” centers around down to nothing. As the series the (corrupt) relationship attempts to move at a fast and between a news producer and exciting pace, the “Notorious” criminal justice lawyer, working pilot becomes a textbook case of together to influence the media. quantity over quality, confusing The lawyer Jake Gregorian (Dan- lies for drama and power for sex iel Sunjata, “Graceland”) is able appeal. to control his clients’ public perWhile the drama attempts ceptions, while producer Julia (and fails) to hit the audience George (Piper Perabo, “Covert with punchy plot lines, character Affairs”) gets insider tips on development is completely Daily Arts Writer
C-
Classifieds
neglected. By the end of the pilot, Jake and Julia still read completely flat as Perabo and Sanjata deliver lines that are painfully overdramatized. Without any insight into their backstory or the foundation of their relationship, the audience is unable to connect with the two main characters, who are seemingly driven only by power and success. The pilot does not create a deeper understanding of their motivations, nor does it allow viewers to empathize with the backhanded way Jake and Julia go about reaching their goals. There’s no chemistry on a personal or professional level, making their supersecret relationship hard to buy. Unfortunately, they’re just boring. “Notorious” has some big shoes to fill as it stands in for “Scandal” on ABC’s coveted TGIT lineup of Shondaland shows. But despite the beautiful people and high-drama plotline that fall suspiciously close to the Shondaland structure, “Notorious” is not even in the same ballpark as Shonda Rhimes’s series. The characters are weak, the story directionless and the drama convoluted. After only one episode, “Notorious” already tastes stale.
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RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, September 28, 2016
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Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
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09/28/16
YOU'RE DOING GREAT AND WE know you can do it. Don't give up!
By Timothy L. Meaker ©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/28/16
Having an account on social media is like living a double life. On the internet and our mobile devices, we show the parts of ourselves that we want people to see, but not necessarily the entire picture of who we are. We frequently display the good parts of ourselves, not the more vulnerable aspects of our personality and daily life. Essentially, what we create, produce and express online becomes our virtual identity. Since the dawn of the modern selfie, Instagram has become one of the more prominent determinants of virtual identity in the digital age, totaling about 400 million users since December 2015. Facebook and Twitter have given people the agency to connect with friends and post their personal thoughts on specific issues, but Instagram has been the forefront of showcasing the image and lifestyle of a person. Along with every other social networking site/app, Instagram is a program that feeds us the autonomy to present what we want to our friends and followers through sharing photos underscored with funny, witty and thoughtprovoking captions. But more importantly, it’s how we present ourselves on Instagram that dictates the kind of person we want to be perceived as online. Two recently growing trends on Instagram, “finstas” and “thirst traps,” have established just how our virtual identities can either feel genuine or excessively distorted. Finstas? Thirst traps? What are these strange words you speak of? Don’t worry, Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Let me break it down. A “finsta” is short for “finstagram,” a combination of “fake” and “Instagram”; the word itself refers to a second, private Instagram account users create in order to post funny, embarrassing photos of themselves, only for their closest friends to see. Though a finsta is deemed as something “fake,” the irony of it is that a finsta account is the
closest thing your friends have to seeing an unfiltered, real version of yourself. “Finstas provide an opportunity to post things without the typical barriers of social media,” said Engineering senior Susan Rusinowski. “It allows users to reclaim the platform and have fun without the fear of being judged.” Rusinowski is among the multitude of mostly high school and college-aged students around the country who’ve created a finsta account. In addition to being more unfiltered (literally and figuratively), finstas are also less concerned with creating and publishing the perfect picture with the perfect caption, acting almost like a personal photo diary exclusively for the eyes of the users and a select group of people. In fact, finstas can even have the power to build selfesteem. Rusinowski notes that having a finsta has made her a lot more open about herself, as well as less embarrassed at funny or unflattering pictures of herself on social media. “It’s forced me to be more real about my day to day life on social media and feel more comfortable laughing at myself,” she said. This contrasts greatly to the other popular trend on Instagram, the “thirst trap,” which, according to Urban Dictionary, is any photo or statement on a social media platform, especially on Instagram, posted to intentionally create attention or “thirst.” A thirst trap can be anything as suggestive as a steamy workout selfie or as explicit as an almost completely nude, just-got-out-of-theshower photo. Make no mistake: thirst traps are not the same as ordinary Instagram users posting selfies. There’s a huge difference between posting a selfie for the sake of attention, showing off your sexiness, a photo blog tracking your health and fitness progress or a post with a bodypositive message. In any case, posting photos of yourself is in and of itself a form of flaunting.
Yet thirst trappers capitalize on this flaunting by objectifying their bodies and publishing totally perfected versions of themselves. Take English thirst trapper Liam Jolley (132k followers), for example. Nearly all of the photos that appear on his Instagram profile are shirtless, nearly nude pictures of himself, whether at the gym, in the bathroom or by a luxurious pool (note: the phrase “TURN ON POST NOTIFICATIONS” is emblazoned in his bio). Most thirst trappers, such as Jolley, attempt to relate to their audience, captioning their photos with common phrases or an abundance of hashtags, even when they have literally nothing to do with the photos themselves. While thirst traps may have the most benevolent of intentions, they can have a negative, even detrimental impact on the users themselves, as it can affect men and women suffering from body dysmorphia and eating disorders. A recent article on Out.com changed that most thirst trappers, predominantly gay men, are suffering from body dysmorphia, having to exercise and take photos of themselves constantly in order to feel somewhat better about their self-perception. This all goes back to this idea of not just how we want to present ourselves on social media, but whether or not we are willing to be more vulnerable on our online accounts. Based on my observations, I find that finstas allows us to embrace our flaws, while regular Instagram allows us to hide them, and thirst traps allows us to repress them excessively. Sure, it’s nice to look at attractive people and there’s almost nothing like the dopamine rush you get when your profile picture or the gorgeous pic you took of the sky gets a ton of likes. Then again, anything we post, publish and share isn’t necessarily 100 percent of who we are. Sometimes, it’s who we want to be. Though it may be impossible, we should strive to at least try to be the realest person we can be on social media.
COMMUNITY CULTURE PREVIEW
‘RoosevElvis’ makes Michigan stop The eclectic two-woman show is an exciting quest for identity ERIKA SHEVCHEK
In an interview, Libby King, who plays Ann/Elvis, described what it’s like to play two different What happens when two of characters in one. America’s most impactful and “I am doing things that I would famous icons, President Teddy never be comfortable doing,” she Roosevelt and Elvis Presley, join said, like dancing on stage as a together to set confident figure out on a soulwith “male energy.” searching journey Despite her fun role RoosevElvis to Graceland? as Elvis Presley, Thursday, 7:30 p.m. Rachel Chavkin, King also has the Libby King and challenge of playing Friday, 8 p.m. Kristen Sieh Ann. Saturday, 8 p.m. explore the “The harder possibilities of this parts are Ann’s Lydia Mendelssohn wild adventure character and Theatre in The TEAM’s her story… she’s production of incredibly lonely. $12 students, $25 “RoosevElvis,” But there is a lot of adults coming to Ann loss in Ann’s life Arbor next week. and Elvis’ life,” she Based out of Brooklyn, The said. TEAM is a performance group King co-lead for “RoosevElvis,” that draws material from Kristen Sieh also designed the American history and mythology costumes for this show, including to create original productions her own character of Brenda/ that comment on modern issues. Teddy. From these stories spring themes “I always try to think in this of hardship and triumph meant to sense of stage picture or ways that inspire new ideas and challenge design can communicate story the status quo. or feeling,” she said, adding that Centering around a her character Teddy is “trying to hallucinated journey, be a badass in the West,” and she “RoosevElvis” focuses on two is “always keeping in mind of the characters: Ann, an introverted constraints of the kind of clothing meat-processing worker, and people would wear in the 1870s. Brenda, a taxidermist with a Alongside King and Sieh is bubbly personality who grew associate director Jake Margolin up in North Dakota. When and director and co-writer, Rachel Ann and Brenda decide to take Chavkin. The winner of two Obie their imaginary adventure to Awards, Chavkin has directed Graceland, they choose to embody many shows not only for The the personas of Elvis Presley and TEAM, but other off-Broadway his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, production groups. Nevertheless, respectively. “RoosevElvis” is a show that is Daily Arts Writer
different from the rest. “ ‘RoosevElvis’ is the most intimate work The TEAM has made … not only in terms of the vibe, but the fact that there were only four of us in the room writing this together.” The show stands in a category of its own for many reasons: a two-woman show with four characters, the experimental use of light, design, music and choreography and the modern themes of gender, sex and identity. “The demand for consistent emotional and intellectual complexity, nuance upon nuance and layering upon layering of image and language … that is a thing I don’t find anywhere else,” Chavkin said. From touring in places like London and Boston, The TEAM is anticipating a different and younger audience here in Ann Arbor. Because the show exemplifies a powerful theme in self-discovery, having an audience on a college campus goes hand in hand with the concept that young people are “still solidifying their sense of self,” Sieh said. In addition to the show, there will be a Q&A on Thursday, with The TEAM. Given their excitement for a younger crowd and the show’s discussion of gender archetypes, Chavkin finished the interview with one question in mind: “It feels like there is such a live conversation that gets at the center of Americans … who gets to be a hero in America? That, for me, is really the heart of this.”
Sports
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com T E A M
S T A T S MICH 52.0 23.5 229.8 5.4 15 238.0 64.3% 7.6 9 1 74.0 467.8 54.4% 62.5% 4.3 15.7 23.6 41.5 4-6 4/1 43.5 32:26
Points/Game First Downs/Game Rush Yards/Game Yards/Rush Rushing TDs Passing Yards/Game Completion % Yards/Pass Passing TDs Interceptions Offensive Plays/Game Total Offense 3rd-down Conversions 4th-down Conversions Sacks/Game Kick return average Punt return average Punting average Field Goals-Attempts Fumbles/Lost Penalty Yards/Game Time of Poss
OPP 13.8 14.5 122.5 3.4 2 147.2 49.1% 5.6 4 3 62.5 269.8 12.0% 45.5% 1.3 20.0 17.5 38.0 2-5 7/3 48.8 27:34
I N D I V I D U A L S PASSING Player Speight O’Korn Morris TOTALS
Cmp Att 72 114 5 8 4 4 81 126
Yds 875 32 45 952
TD 9 0 0 9
INT 1 0 0 1
Att 39 29 33 22 7 5 2 2 9 1 1 3 1 1 1 3 1 10 170
Yds Avg 259 6.6 213 7.3 150 4.5 145 6.6 56 8.0 36 7.2 24 12.0 17 8.5 17 1.9 14 14.0 11 11.0 7 2.3 2 2.0 1 1.0 -1 -1.0 -4 -1.3 -11 -11.0 -17 -1.7 919 5.4
Lg 42 43 25 40 19 17 17 10 4 14 11 3 2 1 0 0 0 9 43
TD 2 3 2 3 0 1 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15
No. 17 19 8 4 6 4 1 1 3 3 1 7 1 1 2 2 1 81
Yds Avg 248 14.6 234 12.3 145 18.1 88 22.0 47 7.8 28 7.0 22 22.0 21 21.0 20 6.7 19 6.3 18 18.0 16 2.3 15 15.0 12 12.0 10 5.0 6 3.0 3 3.0 952 11.8
Lg 45 25 35 54 15 15 22 21 8 14 18 9 15 12 5 4 3 54
TD 4 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 9
No. 10 1 0 11
Yds 227 27 6 260
RUSHING Player Smith, D. Evans Isaac Higdon McDoom Chesson Peppers Davis Hill Morris Crawford O’Korn Hirsch Beneducci Hewlett TEAM Allen Speight TOTALS RECEIVING Player Darboh Butt Chesson Perry Hill Poggi Ways Isaac McDoom Evans Crawford Smith, D. Hirsch Jocz McKeon Bunting Asiasi TOTALS
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 — 7A
Lewis battling through rust from injury All-American cornerback says he’s back to full speed but having to take better care of his body MAX BULTMAN
Managing Sports Editor
Jourdan Lewis is 21 years old and listed at 5 feet 11 inches, 186 pounds. He’s one of college football’s top athletes at one of its most challenging positions — cornerback — and is in what most people would call the best shape of their lives. And yet, speaking to a group of reporters Tuesday, he sounded like a man starting to feel his age. “As a freshman, I felt like I never had to pay attention to anything like (taking care of my body),” Lewis said. “Just go out there and play. But now I have to go out there and warm up 30 minutes before I get out there. … I can’t eat everything now, my metabolism is slowing down, I’ve been getting a little bigger.” Lewis made his return to action Saturday against Penn State after missing the season’s first three games with nagging injuries that trace back to his core. He wasn’t pleased with his performance — which saw him record a tackle for loss and break up a pass — and admitted some rust. He was unabashed in conceding he held a Penn State receiver, due in part to that rust. And he especially wasn’t shy in saying that he felt his soreness after the game. “My first game back, it really hurt,” Lewis said. “I have to be honest. I haven’t been through anything physically (challenging) like that in a while.” Lewis is lucky, though, to get that rust out in a 39-point win. His next game may not allow for him to be so cavalier in taking or admitting penalties. Michigan has blown through
SAM MOUSIGIAN/Daily
Senior cornerback Jourdan Lewis is back in the starting lineup after missing the first three games with injuries, but he’s still working to regain his rhythm.
its first four opponents, winning by a combined margin of 153 points. But when No. 8 Wisconsin comes to town, the Wolverines will be facing a team that is capable of burning them on both sides of the ball. With redshirt freshman quarterback Alex Hornibrook now under center, the Badgers spread the ball around in
their 30-6 win over then-No. 8 Michigan State on Saturday. Five different receivers had at least two catches, led by junior Jazz Peavy, who had four receptions for 96 yards. Peavy, listed at 6-foot-1, is one of many Badger receivers who will pose a physical challenge for the Michigan secondary. And with the Wolverines losing their
“My first game back, it really hurt. I have to be honest.”
tallest cornerback, Jeremy Clark, for the season with an ACL injury, Lewis will need to be at the top of his game in a hurry. “We’re really preparing for those receivers,” Lewis said. “Those guys are big and physical and fast.” While Lewis says he normally likes to lead by example — and All-American play is not a bad example to set — his injury forced him to become more vocal early in the season. “If you can’t go out there and play, you have to impact the
team in different ways,” Lewis said. “So I definitely was more vocal in trying to inspire those guys to play at their best.” Now Lewis is back on the field, and he can go back to letting his play do the talking. He was not satisfied with his first game back, saying he wants to be more technically sound going forward. But Lewis’s most important plays are no doubt ahead of him. “I feel like I’m at full speed,” Lewis said. “Does it hurt a little bit? Yeah. But you have to play through that a little bit.”
PUNT RETURNS Player Peppers Jocz Perry TOTALS
Avg. Long 22.7 54 27.0 0 -6 23.6 54
TD 1 0 1 2
Yds 51 27 22 100
Avg. Long 51.0 51 27.0 27 22.0 22 33.3 51
TD 1 1 0 2
Yds 9 9
Avg. Long 9.0 9 9.0 9
TD 0 0
Yds Avg. Long 81 40.5 55 28 14.0 15 21 10.5 18 6 6.0 6 5 2.5 5 141 15.7 55
TD 0 0 0 0 0 0
INTERCEPTION RETURNS Player Stribling Hill, D. McCray TOTALS
No. 1 1 1 3
FUMBLE RETURNS Player Hill, L. TOTALS
No. 1 1
KICKOFF RETURNS Player Peppers Henderson Lewis Hudson Hill, K. TOTALS
No. 2 2 2 1 2 9
KICKOFFS Player Allen Foug TOTALS
No. 29 7 20
Yds 1872 403 1243
Avg. 64.6 57.6 62.2
TB 17 2 10
No. 11 11
Yds 456 456
Avg. 41.5 41.5
Lg 55 55
PUNTING Player Allen TOTALS FIELD GOALS Player Allen
FG Pct. 1-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50+ Lg 4-6 66.7% 0-0 1-1 3-4 0-1 0-0 39
LEADING TACKLERS Player Gedeon Peppers Thomas McCray Winovich Gary Glasgow, R. Godin Hill, D. Wormley Hurst Clark Stribling Kinnel Charlton Watson Bush Glasgow, J. Hudson Uche Marshall Wroblewski TOTALS
Solo 12 22 15 12 5 6 5 6 6 5 6 3 4 1 2 2 3 2 2 1 129
Ast Tot TFL 26 38 6.0 11 33 9.5 10 25 10 22 4.5 14 19 4.0 9 15 4.5 13 13 1.0 7 12 1.5 6 12 2.0 6 12 3.5 6 11 4.0 4 10 5 8 0.5 3 7 4 5 2.0 3 5 3 5 1 4 2 4 2 4 2 3 3 3 154 283 45.0
SK PBU 2.0 2.5 1 2.5 3 2.0 1.0 0.5 1.0 1 3.0 2.0 3 3 1.5 18.0 13
2016 SCHEDULE
Wisconsin native Bredeson ready for Badgers True freshman offensive lineman to match up Saturday against the team he grew up rooting for KELLY HALL
Daily Sports Editor
March 1, 2014, is a day that Wisconsin native Ben Bredeson will never forget. It was the day that the football team he rooted for as a child, the Badgers, gave him a scholarship to play football. But a lot can change in two years. Instead of suiting up in Wisconsin red and white, he’s playing for the No. 4 Michigan football team as a left guard. There are many factors that went into his choice to play for the Wolverines, with their brand new coaching staff being the main determinant. So far, the decision is paying off. Most true freshmen offensive linemen don’t get the opportunity to play, but Bredeson has appeared in every game this season as relief for an experienced line. This week, he will prepare for the eighthranked Badgers in the first top10 matchup of his career. “I’ve been getting texts since the beginning of the year from people who are excited about the game,” Bredeson said. “Not anyone who’s on the team, but just friends from back home. The majority — I think like a third of my graduating class — all went to Madison, so I have a lot of friends from the school, and I’m pretty excited about it.” Bredeson has a lot of friends and family coming out to Ann Arbor for the weekend, and though they may have always rooted for Wisconsin growing up in Hartland, he’s giving them a reason to question their fandom — if friends of the Bredeson family didn’t already have enough.
9/3
9/10
9/17
9/24
HAWAII (1-3)
UCF (2-2)
COLORADO (3-1)
PENN ST. (2-2)
W, 63-3 (1-0) W, 51-14 (2-0) W, 45-28 (3-0) W, 49-10 (4-0)
Ben’s brother, Jack, is a sophomore right-handed pitcher for the Michigan baseball team. “I was going to come here anyway,” Ben said. “But (having Jack on campus) has helped a lot. He’s given me the lay of the land and it’s nice to have a close family member here, so when you just need someone from home, you can call him.” The brothers played hockey and football together often, but Ben never dabbled in baseball. He says he’s “very awful, terrible” at his brother’s game, and on top of that, he’s afraid of the ball. He grew up playing hockey instead, starting the game when he was three years old. He says it was his first love, and though he decided to shift his focus to football once high school started, the skating skills have transferred over to the gridiron. “Hockey is all footwork there,” Bredeson said. “It’s not really the same style, but just being light on your feet and being able to change direction quick. Being able to read plays before it happens and read body language and then just reacting to it. It translates to the offensive line world pretty well — surprisingly well.” Despite the move from high school to college, which included a move from left tackle to guard, Bredeson seems to have a handle on his role on the football team. Having his brother on campus definitely helps, but the support from his teammates has been incalculable. Fifth-year senior Ben Braden has taken Bredeson under his wing. Though they’re battling for the same job, Bredeson is not surprised at all about Braden’s
10/1
10/8
WISCONSIN (4-0) at RUTGERS (2-2) 3:30, Michigan Stadium, ABC
7 or 8 p.m., Piscataway, N.J.
AMANDA ALLEN/Daily
Freshman offensive lineman Ben Bredeson (74) has appeared in every game this season as a substitute at left guard.
willingness to help. “(Braden has helped) a lot more than you can imagine,” Bredeson said. “He and I roomed together all camp and we room together in the hotel for game nights. He’s helped me with plays, protections, pre-game tests, life — basically everything. He’s helped me a ton. “He has gone far out of his way to help me, mentally and physically, with the game.” But Bredeson isn’t just being
helped out by the older players on the team. He remembers jumping off the walls of his high school on National Signing Day when he found out that freshman defensive end Rashan Gary also committed to Michigan. That was before Bredeson even really knew Gary. Now, the two practice together all week. “Rashan and I are great friends,” Bredeson said. “Just to watch him compete, it’s so
“I have a lot of friends from (Wisconsin), and I’m pretty excited about it.”
10/22 ILLINOIS (1-2) 3:30 p.m., Michigan Stadium
10/29
11/5
at MICH. ST. (2-1) MARYLAND (3-0) East Lansing, Mich.
Michigan Stadium
much fun to watch. He has that intensity and that fire in him every single play, and you can see it. It’s real visible, and you can really appreciate it going against him.” Though many Wolverines maintain that they’re preparing for Wisconsin the same way they prepared for earlier opponents this season, the game will be a little different for Bredeson. “I’m from the state and I grew up watching them all the time, but it’s just going to be a huge game for us,” Bredeson said. “It’s a big top-10 matchup and they’ve been coming out strong at the beginning of the year, and so have we, so it’s gonna be a heck of a game on Saturday.”
11/12
11/19
11/26
at IOWA (3-1)
INDIANA (2-1)
at OHIO ST. (3-0)
8 p.m., Iowa City, Iowa
Michigan Stadium
Columbus, Ohio
News
8A — Wednesday, September 28, 2016
UM Medical School hosts ceremony for body donors Students express appreciation in Rackham Auditoriam Tuesday night MATT HARMON For the Daily
In Rackham Auditorium Tuesday night, about 300 medical and dental students, as well as their family and friends, attended the University of Michigan Anatomical Donations Program’s annual memorial service for those who have donated their bodies to medical research. The service included speeches from students about the importance of donors and the impact they have on student education, performances by the Auscultations Student Choir and a closed casket viewing in honor of the people who gave their bodies to science. Dean Mueller, director of the anatomical donations program, said the students who worked with the donors took the initiative to show the importance of the donation. “We are here to memorialize the donors that give their bodies to science,” Mueller said. “It’s really more of a thank you service from the students to the donors, and it is just a great way to ground everybody and bring them back home and help everybody remember why we’re doing what we’re doing and how important it is.” The Revised Michigan Anatomical Gift Law, which was amended in 2008, allows residents to donate their bodies “for the purpose of transplantation, therapy, research, or education … ” This decision can be made by authorizing a donor symbol to be imprinted on one’s driver’s license, writing a donor statement in wills or making the decision while
terminally ill. Once registered, the Anatomical Donations Program facilitates the usage of the donor at the University of Michigan. First-year Dental student Peter Arvanitis spoke about the benefits of having physical subjects to learn from, describing them as crucial to long-term practical knowledge. “As great as our anatomy faculty is here at Michigan, there are certain things that can’t be conveyed only through diagrams and lectures,” Arvanitis said. “As some of the other students here can attest, the things that can be taught through diagrams and lectures are sometimes forgotten shortly after the next test. But learning with our donors was tangible, it was vivid and that solidified the concepts in my mind.” First-year Medical student Marwa Ayyash said she considers the act of donating one’s body to education to be extremely charitable and kind. “It’s really honorable because as students it really helps us a lot and for the families; I think it’s a noble cause,” she said. “It allows the families and the person who donated their body for this to help shape our lives as doctors.” In a speech written as a letter to her donor, secondyear Medical student Kathryn Brown said a deep connection forms between the student and the donor. “To our donor, today we learned about the anatomy of the legs,” Brown said. “Those words might sound simple or boring maybe, but I want to thank you because with your
help, it was amazing. These hands, did they once cradle new life? Your well-worn feet, to what corners of the world did they walk? … You can’t tell us, but just know that we wonder and appreciate that the answers are important.” A common theme among student responses was the importance of giving thanks to both the donors and their families and friends. First-year Dental student Andrew Brown said without donors, he and his classmates’ formal education would not be possible. “I think I speak for our class when I say, as we continue on these journeys, we will be forever grateful for the gifts that you have given to us, to this school and to the future of our health care,” Brown said. Attendees Crystal Childs and Sam Cross from East Leroy, Mich., and Charlotte, Mich., respectively, said they were grateful for the hospitality and the memorial service for their loved ones. Cross was supportive of the donation process and said she hopes that the University’s students will use the education they gain from donations to cure illnesses tomorrow. “I can see the great benefit of it, that it does help in research of diseases and what goes on in the human body,” Cross said. Childs, who lost her stepfather to Lewy Body Dementia last September, said she agreed with Arvanitis. “I think it’s great,” Childs said. “Hearing the students speak about how much it means to them spoke to me. A book is a book and a lecture is a lecture but to really solidify education you have to touch and see.”
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Robbery reported on N. Thayer St. Tuesday On Tuesday at 12:30 a.m., two men entered and robbed an apartment on the 400 block of North Thayer Street, near the School of Nursing. Five residents, who are University of Michigan students, were present, according to a crime alert issued at 6:39 a.m. by the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security. According to a press release from the Ann Arbor Police Department, the men
approached the house and asked if they could charge their cell phone. Once they were inside, one man pulled out a handgun and demanded credit cards, computers and cash. Though several items were stolen, no one was hurt and no shots were fired. It is unknown in which direction the men fled from the house, and a K-9 track was unsuccessful. The suspects were described
as each being approximately 6’0” to 6’5” and 200lbs. Detectives are still interviewing victims and are hoping to get more information in the coming days. Detective Lieutenant Matthew Lige said as more information becomes available, AAPD will inform the campus community. This is a developing story. Check back at michigandaily. com for updates. — Jennifer Meer
CSG pens statement on racially charged fliers On Tuesday, Central Student Government released the second of two statements this week supporting Black students after racially charged posters were found on the University of Michigan’s campus Monday. “If we are truly are the ‘Leaders and Best,’ then we must work to ensure that every student feels welcomed, safe, and valued at Michigan,” the statement said. “Until we do so, we cannot honestly describe ourselves as such.” The posters, found Monday in Mason and Haven Hall, listed “reasons why white women shouldn’t date black men” and “race differences in intelligence.” A third type called upon “Euro-Americans” to stop “denying your heritage” and “be white.” A group called
the Alt-Right movement has claimed responsibility for creating and distributing the fliers. The Alt-Right is a whitesupremacist organization that has been labeled as a hate-group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to U.S. News, the group has targeted people of color, Jewish people and women. More than 200 students gathered in the Fishbowl Monday night to protest, calling for more action from the administration. Some attendees, like LSA junior Lakyrra Magee, wished to see quicker turnover to the University President Mark Schlissel’s diversity plan, which aims to create a long-term strategy for increasing diversity on campus, with a benchmark of 2025.
“It’s possible to do both,” Magee said, referring to the University addressing current events and the five-year Diversity, Equity & Inclusion plan. “But they’re not doing it. We want Schlissel to address us … about 2017, not 2025.” Last Friday, CSG also released a statement in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in solidarity with Eastern Michigan University students after racist graffiti was found in EMU dorms and academic buildings. Tuesday’s statement expressed a similar sentiment from the one on Friday, calling for solidarity. “Let us start affirming that #BlackLivesMatter — today and everyday,” the statement said. — Nisa Khan
D E T R O I T C I T Y S T U DY
ARNOLD ZHOU/Daily
Rackham student Shira Schwartz explains the effective uses of co-learning spaces at a discussion hosted by the Institute for the Humanities at the Thayer Building Tuesday.
TRUMP From Page 1A Clinton unfavorably and 63 percent say the same for Trump. While he acknowledged the unpopularity of the two candidates, McPherson said he believes the TV media is pushing a false equivalency on the ratings between the two candidates that shouldn’t exist. “Our goal is to correct the perception of Trump. We don’t think he is qualified at all, especially compared to Clinton,” McPherson said. “I imagine him being in the most powerful position ever and there is no way that it could end well.” The group hopes to eventually plan a rally in the University’s diag to speak out against Trump. As of now, they are bringing in activists and volunteers to interact with club members. “We want to funnel people who aren’t involved to join what is more of an activist group,” McPherson said. “We have more of a Democratic tilt, but we do have some Libertarians that feel like they have to vote for Clinton.” While ultimately McPherson said he thinks Clinton is the better candidate, he added that the group aims to spark critical conversation rather than promote Clinton’s candidacy. “Even if you vastly disagree with Clinton, you can’t say that Trump would be the better option,” McPherson said. “What we do is more about visibility, getting people to talk with friends and family about the election.” The group’s anti-Trump view was also held by the majority of a sample of students in a poll conducted by The Michigan Daily. Almost 75 percent of repondents said they planned to vote for Clinton.
Public Policy junior Molly Aronson, a club member, said besides disagreeing with Trump’s conservative policies, she believes that the GOP candidate is a dangerous choice for the country. “People are talking about the election in the sense that Clinton is the lesser of two evils,” Aronson said. “I see it in the opposite sense because if Trump were elected it could create a dangerous environment for a lot of people.” Similar to Aronson, LSA sophomore Lauren Schandevel said she believes voting in this election is more than just a question of whose policies you prefer. Schandevel, who helped to create the club at its onset but is no longer a member said she finds Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric alarming. “It mobilizes sections of the population that have been dormant for awhile but now they feel like someone is speaking for them,” Schandevel said. “(It’s) creating this kind of atmosphere where people feel like it’s acceptable to hate and to be open about it. I think that’s a really dangerous thing.” Schandevel also noted that a large emphasis in this election is the lasting legacy the next president will have choosing a replacement for deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “This is going to be someone who is either going to preserve progressive policies that have done a lot of good ... that’s decades of lingering effects of this presidency,” Schandevel said. However, it is also this lingering effect of a SCOTUS justice that is the primary influence on Engineering sophomore Jack Kuchta in his decision to vote for Trump. Kuchta said that his foundation is built on conservative values, citing his Catholic upbringing.
“For me, a big reason that I would vote for Trump is to pick a conservative, pro-life justice to replace Antonin Scalia who definitely held my conservative, pro-life values,” Kuchta said. Kuchta added that, as a conservative on a primarily liberal campus, he has felt threatened by people attacking him for what they assume are his views, based on depictions of Trump supporters in the media. Referencing Clinton calling half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” Kuchta said Clinton and the media are painting Trump supporters in a negative light, leaving people assuming that all Trump supporters as racists and homophobic. “We don’t want Trump solely for him ... I know people who are voting for Trump solely because they want a conservative justice,” Kuchta said. “For me, if someone loves someone, cool, that doesn’t affect me. If they want to get married, that’s totally fine by me. A lot of people think conservatives are complete homophobes. It’s a very bad representation of conservatives.” When asked about the creation of this club, the University’s College Republicans, who endorsed Trump, wrote in a statement, “The creation of this club doesn’t come to much of a surprise given the liberal bias of this university. Aside from supporting Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, College Republicans will also be working with the campaigns of Congressman Dave Trott and Congressman Mike Bishop. We encourage all conservatives to uphold our values by supporting our local and congressional Republican candidates.” College Democrats declined to comment on the existence of Students Against Trump.
FROM MILITARY TIME
statement T H E M I C H I G A N DA I LY | S E P T E M B E R 2 8 , 2 0 1 6
TO MICHIGAN TIME
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Wednesday, September 28, 2016 / The Statement
t h e s t at e m e n t
the tangent
Magazine Editor: Karl Williams
Editor in Chief: Shoham Geva
Deputy Editors: Nabeel Chollampat Lara Moehlman
Managing Editor: Laura Schinagle
Design Editor: Shane Achenbach Photo Editor: Zoey Holmstrom
Copy Editors: Emily Campbell Alexis Nowicki Taylor Grandinetti
Creative Director: Emilie Farrugia
How To: An Incomplete Guide to Getting a College Degree B Y S Y LVA N N A G R O S S
I can already hear my sister’s response to this column: “WE GET IT SYLVANNA, YOU’RE GRADUATING EARLY.” My younger sister, Phoebe, is probably happy I started off with a blatant acceptance of how humblebrag this space can get. So there you go, Phoebe. This is my public acceptance that I, Sylvanna Leah Gross, am kind of an asshole. Moving forward. This space is meant to be a comment on how every senior is in this weird limbo of almost having to be an adult with taxes and mortgages while still forgetting that you should be taking vitamins every day, not just when you remember you should be taking them. It’s dedicated to seniors who feel like they’re occupying a liminal space where they can’t be considered full-blown adults yet, but are being forced to make very adult decisions. It’s for people like me, who are scared to move forward. Being scared isn’t a bad thing. It’s a natural response to going into the unknown. It’s what you should be when something happens that you’re not familiar with. From my basic understanding of the sciences, it’s a biological response. So why are seniors so scared of being scared? For me, it’s the fact that for the first time there is no absolute formula for what we have to do. Growing up, I knew the formula that my teachers pounded into my head: high school, college, job. But it was relatively easy to make the jump
from high school to college. One quick application, a couple of rejections and a couple of acceptances and one decision to the best public university in the world. But now, the jump isn’t as clearcut. I could get a job. Or I could get a master’s degree or go into a doctorate program or earn a fellowship or go into an internship or take time off and travel (this last option is not supported by my bank account, unfortunately). I’m the type of person who always had a plan. But for the first time in my life, I have no clue what my next step will be. I know I want to go to law school, but I also know I’m not ready yet for that step. Because once I go, I have to get a job. And once I get a job, that’s my life. I completely understand that I am making this process feel way too black and white. Of course there are alternative ways of living your life, and there are many reasons why I am being insensitive to how I had the privilege of going to college and so am not in the place to complain. But, I am complaining. Because I’m scared and I know a lot of you are too. So here’s some tips on relaxing and being less scared for at least 10 minutes. 1. You are not alone 2. It will feel like you are alone but let me repeat, YOU ARE NOT ALONE 3. But maybe, find yourself a quiet place and be alone physically 4. Put on your relaxing music (U2 or some Jason Mraz puts me in
T H O U G H T B U B B L E : D E B AT E S
a good mood) 5. Drink a glass of water 6. Lay in your bed 7. Put your phone down and turn on “Do not disturb” 8. Just listen (it is very possible you might mistake this as a nap, it is very important you do not mistake this as a nap) 9. Think about your mom, or dad, or siblings, or significant other or any person who stands beside you no matter what 10. If you want to pass on step 8 for whatever personal matter, think about cute cuddly puppies or think of the funniest memory you have 11. Remember, you are not alone.
EMILIE FARRUGIA/DAILY
“I’ve been thinking about Andy Warhol’s idea of repetition in his work. His idea is that with the repetition of an image, that image is then deflated of meaning. I disagree with Warhol’s notion as of late because the more I see the presidential candidates ,the less numb I feel about them. Watching the debate was disturbing on many levels. What was even more disturbing was seeing everyone laugh about it. People can laugh all they want, but one of those two people will be leading our country very soon.” – Art & Design Senior Benjamin Leigh
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 / The Statement
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on the record: presidential debate “This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said that women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men.”
“I think my strongest asset by far is my temperament. I have a winning temperament.” —DONALD TRUMP, to which the live audience at Hofstra University audibly laughed.
— HILLARY CLINTON, Democratic presidential nominee, referring to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s comments toward and about women.
“African-Americans, Hispanics are living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot. We have to take the guns away from the people that shouldn’t them. These are bad people. —DONALD TRUMP, describing what he said is the everyday reality for communities of color.
All Around the World: Rethinking Group Work BY ISOBEL FUT TER
C
oming into college, it’s safe to assume you’ll have a group assignment or two. They can go in many directions: some nice, others painful. In my experience, everyone just wants to get the work done as quickly as possible — with as few conflicts as possible. More motivated members pick up the slack for the less motivated ones, and so the vicious cycle of disdain toward group projects begins. Last year when an assignment in one of my classes called for pair work, we would switch partners throughout the semester to get to know all the people in the class. The assignments were short and I’d meet with my partner for an hour or so to get the job done, refraining from talk of our personal lives, where we were from or even what brought us to the University of Michigan. During the second rotation, my partner took the time to ask me how my day was, which was weird. I was used to getting straight to business, not dabbling in something as wishy-washy as the quality of my day. Why would we waste time on this? It wasn’t going to change anything and would only detract from the time we had to complete the assignment. But as we asked each other questions, delving into one another’s lives, the conversation became more natural and enjoyable. Suddenly, 30 minutes had gone by and I’d made a connection with someone who is still my friend today. In taking the time to learn about this person’s life, I found that he was an international student here and had lived in many different countries before coming to the University of Michigan. I remember thinking how cool that was,
that someone would choose to come all the way to Michigan out of all the universities in the world to choose from. Fast forward to winter semester of last year. As part of my involvement in the Center for Positive Organizations — a research center in the Ross School of Business — I was taking a class called The Foundations of Positive Organizational Scholarship. We examined the research behind positive leadership and positive business, learning that everyone you interact with has a story that is unique to them. According toresearch,
there’s strong evidence to support that connecting with people can elevate your mood, build resilience, increase creativity and even improve your health. That’s amazing to me. By talking to others, and listening to their stories, we can feel better about ourselves in multiple ways. The business program at the University is extremely group-oriented. I have group projects for almost all of my classes, and I’m constantly meeting different people; however, oftentimes we aren’t really talking to one another. When I met with my partner for The
Foundations of Positive Organizational Scholarship, I at first didn’t take the time to learn about who he was, what his purpose was in the Business School or what made him tick. I cared about what he brought to the table and how he would help me get the A I so badly wanted. Taking a step back, I realize how much healthier and productive we are when we get to know one another and indulge in each other’s stories. After learning about positive organizational research, my eyes were opened to this unique background people are constantly carrying around on their shoulders. I thought about the myriad types of students we have here on campus and how they have such different life experiences than mine. We have instaters, out-of-staters, first-generation students, fourth-generation students, transfer students, graduate students and people from all over the world here in one place, with so many different stories and purposes. With recruitment for summer internships in full swing, classes, homework and extracurriculars, I know I’m not alone in forgetting about self-care. However, it only takes a few minutes to chat with someone in the Starbucks line, or reach out to an old friend you haven’t spoken with, or even call your grandmother to say hello. After learning about the type of impact these connections with others can have on the mind and body, there’s no reason not to take a chance and learn something new about someone each day.
COVER DESIGN BY SHANE ACHENBACH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
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Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
MILITARY TIME TO MICHIGAN TIME:
HOW STUDENT VETERANS
ADAPT TO CAMPUS LIFE
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ric Fretz showed up early, wearing a smile and a tan baseball cap. He emailed me upon his arrival — stating where exactly he was sitting — and he made sure to be accommodating, suggesting we move away from the noise of the coffee shop to ensure a clearer recording. He must have picked up my nervous, slightly unsure demeanor, as he began to answer each of my questions before I had the chance to ask them. Fretz talked for nearly 45 minutes without interruption. A faculty adviser — and previous member — of the University of Michigan Student Veteran Association, Fretz was one of many veterans on campus who shared with me their stories transitioning from military life to academia. From conversations with several, a common thread emerged — that at the University don’t know there is a large community of veterans on campus, made up of students and faculty much like Fretz, who have faced unpredictable challenges and welcomed numerous opportunities associated with military life. These students and faculty have had a variety of unique experiences during their time in the military, including deployment, learning a new set of social rules, acquiring a different language and experiencing a stronger sense of camaraderie than a student organization on campus can typically provide. Similarly, some of the veterans said people are also unaware of the lack of external awareness and naïveté these veterans often encounter when re-entering civilian life. Yet if asked, these men and women will gladly share their stories, and they will arrive to the interview prepared and timely (in fact, with time to spare) — just like their military service taught them to. Fretz first arrived on campus in 1985 on a Navy ROTC scholarship. After graduating four years later, he went into active duty for the Navy for 20 years. Upon returning to the University in 1998 to pursue a dual Ph.D. in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology, Fretz faced a lot of adversity. From being mobilized twice, to having two children, to managing other family circumstances, it took him 12 years to complete the program. “I just wanted to serve,” Fretz said of his military aspirations. Challenges Fretz said there are many struggles veterans have when adjusting to civilian student life. “There’s a fascinating sort of cohesion and unity of purpose that is common to almost all (veterans),” he explained. “There’s this element in the military of trust and common purpose that’s very hard to replicate and find in the civilian world, and one of the things that vets report consistently that puts them most ill at ease, that gets them the most off-balance, is this lack of comradeship.” Because of this, Fretz has a particular way of depicting the contradictory feelings veterans sometimes have in his student veteran transition course. “There’s that picture of this fully grown Adam Sandler in a tiny desk surrounded by tiny desks with tiny kids, and that one picture gets such a visceral response from the vets, because that’s how they feel,” Fretz said. “They are so acutely aware that they are
older and they have had these experiences and they have sort of changed their world view, and they behave differently, they understand accountability differently, they manage their time differently, their life priorities,” he added. “That extreme edge of youth has been forcibly scraped off them and they just feel that very acutely.” Timothy Nellett, another veteran and program coordinator for UM’s Peer Advisors for Veteran Education, said he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2005. After four years in service, Nellett started going to college, first attending two different community colleges before transferring to the University. Nellett feels the best way to describe the student veteran community is by calling them the “non-traditional of the nontraditional.” Philip Larson, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Air Force Reserve, is now director of the UM Student Veterans Assistance Program. He said student veterans oftentimes face situations where their peers seem immature, in the sense that they are lacking in life experience. “To a person who has just been launching aircraft carriers off the deck of the JFK, or a person who has been trying not to get blown up by an IED, this is an extremely foreign environment,” Larson said, emphasizing the differences between student veterans and more “traditional” college students who are focused on Greek life or joining student organizations. “They feel very outside and alone.” Business senior Jonathan Chen, current president of the Student Veterans Association on campus and former sergeant in the Marine Corps, agreed with those sentiments. “Part of you wants to let it go,” Chen said. “But then another part of you is like, this is a huge part of my life, I have something to contribute. Sometimes it’s fighting between those two … At first it’s just like any other social identity, you’re trying to figure out your place within the University, you’re trying to figure out your place within society.” Campus climate Fretz also noted another significant issue: a liberal-leaning political climate generally associated with the University. “It tends to be left-of-center and not particularly pro-military,” Fretz said. “They just feel like they’re not particularly understood, sometimes they feel like they’re treated with contempt … A lot of times they do feel excluded. It’s interesting, they’re not monolithically conservative, but they are monolithically respectful of their time in the military.” One recent example of the conflicting military rhetoric on campus was the incident regarding the showing of “American Sniper” in April 2015. Students raised concern about the film’s antiIslam images, while others, including veterans, said they felt students’ negative responses to the film were indicative of a lack of appreciation for their military service. This has led to divergent responses about whether vets decide to be vocal about their military career on campus. Fretz referred to this as “coming out” as a vet — some student veterans remain “closeted”, while others are open about their experiences and find either that people do not quite know how to react to them, or react to them negatively.
Cassie Michaels, now a University graduate, was enlisted in the Marine Corps prior to coming to the University. Michaels completed one semester of college at UM-Flint before enlisting, and one additional there while applying to transfer to the Ann Arbor campus after serving. Michaels was in her early 20s entering sophomore year, making her a few years older than her peers. She echoed many of the sentiments of other veterans, such as feeling unaccustomed to campus life. In particular, she recounted a story about a class that had an iClicker question in lecture, and though the traditional freshmen and sophomores in the class had an iClicker with them, she didn’t have one and did not know what they were. She also failed her first assignment at the University, something that was also novel to her. Both instances, she said, led to her feeling behind and made her feel she did not align to the campus climate. As part of an even smaller demographic on campus — female veteran students — Michaels said she felt challenged and alone. Though she started going to SVA meetings upon arriving to campus, she found she was the only female there. “We may have had the same experiences while in the military, but they still wouldn’t be the same because they would be male and I would be female,” Michaels said. “I just didn’t feel like my experiences would be valid.” Dentistry junior Alyssa Carrillo, who was a dental lab technician in the Air Force for four years before beginning college in fall 2013, said her troubles identifying with fellow veterans also stemmed from there being so few females who were in the military on campus. Her own experiences now contribute to much of her work as a peer adviser in the Office of New Student Programs, where she often reaches out to other female veterans. “We’re all just student vets trying to figure out how to integrate ourselves into the culture,” Carrillo said. “I always get all the time ‘you’re a vet? You look like you’re 18 and you’re a woman’ — it’s just the stereotypes. But I kind of like that. I think it’s cool to not be a stereotype.” Cultural transition Along with these challenged, veterans said the transition veterans have to make from military life to academia is also a significant change. Fretz, for example, transitioned between life as an ROTC student, receiving another bachelor’s degree while serving time in active duty and getting a Master’s during his time as a reservist. “I had to jump back and forth between the academic world and the military world, and those changes are very dramatic,” Fretz said. “Everybody has their reasons for raising their hand, but once you raise your hand and swear that oath, it’s like you’re not in Kansas anymore … You realize these huge shifts in how systems work, and these different worlds.” Fretz said he experienced a cultural mismatch on a number of occasions. For example, in graduate school, per requests from his professors, he was doing multiple projects at once, often while sacrificing his school work. He said he had a military mindset that his professors were similar to his senior officers, and that they must have had good, important reasoning behind giving him so much work. He added that he has found it interesting
interacting with veterans who are similar to how he was, from a faculty member perspective now saying he understands his students’ natural tendency to exhibit respect toward authority figures. However, he tells them that in a university setting, it is preferred they interact with their professors in a way that is usually much different from their senior officers. Graduate student Aaron Silver, president of the Ross School of Business Armed Forces Association, said he came to the University to pursue a master’s degree in business following five years as an active-duty artillery officer. During his time in the military, Silver was primarily stationed in Germany but also had two deployments overseas. “I think all of those that go through the transition experience a little bit of what I call a culture whiplash,” Silver said. “The military is a lifestyle and to some degree, you’re indoctrinated. It’s a culture with certain norms and mores and expectations and shared beliefs and shared values, and when you leave that culture, life is different.” Silver, however, made sure to highlight that, “while it can be a little jarring to go from military time to Michigan time, (veterans) pay it forward with our shared experiences.” Mental health misconceptions The veterans interviewed also talked extensively about misconceptions attached to veteran stability. “It’s all too common for someone to say, ‘You were a vet? Did you get deployed? Did you kill anyone?’ ” Fretz said. “This idea that every vet is kind of a ticking time bomb, or when you survey employers ‘What’s your biggest concern hiring vets?’ and everybody just thinks that all vets have PTSD, and it’s really not true.” Larson echoed Fretz’s sentiments and said veteran students come back from combat to a — albeit unintentional — naïveté about their experiences on campus. “Two months ago, or a year ago, they were in charge of multi-million-dollar aircraft, they were in charge of keeping other people safe, they were in charge of other people’s wellbeing as an enlisted NCO,” Larson said. “And they come to this campus and nobody gets it — nobody gets it.” Nellett recounted a situation where a student once found out how old he was — older than most of the other students in the class — and asked him what he had been doing with his life, inappropriately insinuating that, because he was older, he must have been taking time off or not taking school seriously. When the student discovered Nellett was in the military, she simply responded, “Please don’t kill me.” “There are some people out there that are like that and create more of a divide than there needs to be, and it mostly stems from a place of ignorance,” Nellett said. “I really don’t think that most of the time it’s coming from a place of malicious intent — it’s really a lack of awareness or understanding.” While on campus, Michaels said she had feelings of anxiety in crowded lecture halls, nightmares and struggled in high-pressure situations — all of which she said are symptoms of her Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “I may jump and flinch whenever I hear a loud noise, or I may feel panicked when I’m
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in an enclosed area with a lot of people, but you just have to trust me that I’ve got this,” Michaels said. “When people think of veterans, they automatically think of this broken person who can’t function in society, and I think that in order to change that, the veterans that are doing well and becoming these really successful, functional citizens, they need to identify themselves as veterans … And the reason why they don’t is because of the stigma.” Because people experience things differently, veterans stressed that traditional students should not generalize student veterans in the same way student veterans should not generalize the student population as ignorant of the military experience. “Like any other social identity, we come with our stereotypes, we come with the stigmas that are attached to it,” Chen said. Larson added that veterans tend to have their own culture that would be beneficial to campus diversity — something Fretz echoed — that could improve other students’ misunderstandings. “From the veteran’s perspective, they find it puzzling and frustrating that the mental health thing is always made salient,” Fretz said. “You never know what journey people are on, and so you shouldn’t discount them — everybody has something to teach here.” Resources Among the challenges, many resources are also available at the University, including several led by veterans. The Student Veterans Assistance Program, run out of the Office of New Student Programs, has goals similar to those of student veteran organizations on campus in ensuring veteran students have the resources necessary to be successful in their academic, professional and social careers at the University and beyond. Larson, the director of the Students Veterans Assistance Program, said he works on a number of efforts to organize University veteran services, such as assisting with college applications, collaborating with VA representatives in the Office of the Registrar and coordinating with certifying officials to ensure students get the appropriate veteran benefits. Additionally, he works with the Office of Financial Aid, University Housing, graduate student organizations and individual college advising within the University, as well as coodinates peer mentor activities. “Along with the academic stress, they may have other life stressors, and so if we can help out with the life stress part, the academic stress becomes a lot more manageable,” Larson said. In his work, Larson said he is able to reduce misconceptions students have about what the military does, honor veterans’ sacrifice and service and help them use their militaryinstilled skills in conjunction with a UM education, all in an attempt to improve the military-to-academia culture shock that he had seen in previous years. “Students came out of the military with … different kind of language, different kind of skillsets, different kind of expectations,” Larson said. “And when they got to campus, they found themselves in a different cultural environment than what they were used to.” Read more at michigandaily.com
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Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
Scared of Romance by Ben Rosenstock, Senior Arts Editor
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am sitting on the bottom stair in February of 2016, glancing at the nearby door to my house, waiting to hear the knock. This is not only my first Tinder date, but my first date in my life. I hear a faint stirring, then steps, and I know she is here. It’s midnight, because that’s the only time we could meet up. We have messaged back and forth for a couple days, first on Tinder, then on Facebook Messenger. Our conversations flow naturally, at least online. We have a lot in common — she’s into the same indie shit that I am. She has the aggressive sarcasm that I am attracted to, and the aggressive forwardness that I feel I need, especially for a potential first girlfriend. I take a deep breath, heart hammering, and open the door. We go up to my room, sit on the bed, and talk. At first she is surprisingly shy compared to the bluntness of her messages, but we quickly become more comfortable together and she begins to resemble the girl that I already feel like I know. Somehow, her rambling, punctuation-less text speak is reflected in her quirky way of speaking, with her loose form of sentence structure. Her sarcasm and irony are immediately present, though in pleasantly lower doses than online — you can easily obscure your feelings with text, hiding your smiles and your laughs and your shock, but now I see her laugh freely and I feel relieved that the irony only goes so far. She tells me random anecdotes from her past, most very funny but with weird, dark undercurrents that somehow make them funnier. I tell her boring things about myself, such as how I won the spelling bee in eighth grade or what classes I’m taking. At one point, she says that I’m sharing a lot, but not sharing my “soul” like she is. I know what she means, but I’m not sure what to do differently. No deeply revealing stories have immediately leaped to mind. She is very forward, just like online, saying something lame and then asking, “Did you like that pick-up line?,” even making startlingly early jokes about what our children will be like. She scoots closer to me and touches my knee and rubs my arm and nestles her head in the crook of my neck and gives me a back massage and then stares down at me from above, unable to stop laughing, as she sits on my stomach and my legs prop up her back. We sit together in silence or lie together whispering or laugh uncontrollably for reasons we can’t remember, and I think about how unusually intimate this is and how this is something I’ve never experienced before, at least in this context. This came from Tinder? In addition to this dreamlike intimacy, I have two dominant emotions: 1. Incredulity that someone actually dressed up and put on makeup and tried to look good for me, and 2. thankfulness that this girl is forward enough to freely admit her intentions and her feelings, because I am absolutely terrible at discerning someone’s feelings for me. This is what I’ve always perceived as the main reason I’ve never had a girlfriend. And then she asks, “Are you maybe ever going to kiss me?” And it’s not in the blunt, funny, here-goes-nothing “kiss me you dummy!” way; it’s in the nervous, unsure, confused way. She is confused because in all the moments where we stared each other in the eyes or laughed inches away from each other, I did not kiss her. And I do not know why. Minutes pass, and I am trying to think of some way to kiss her, but I feel paralyzed. I have kissed two girls before in my life. The first kissed me in high school because I had made my feelings clear and the ball was in her court. The
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA second kissed me outside a frat house bathroom because I hadn’t been actively pursuing her but I guess she wanted to. And now there is this girl and I have never considered myself a shitty kisser and this girl is throwing herself at me and making it clear what she wants and I fucking can’t. I am frozen for minutes and she probably feels my heartbeat, hard and fast. Then I blurt out, “Can I ask you to do something weird?” “Um,” she says, and I quickly say, “I mean, not really weird. Not super weird or anything. Just kind of weird.” “OK, try me,” she says. “Can you … kiss me?” I ask. Well, there’s my soul. She takes a deep breath and I tell her I know it’s stupid or weird and I’m sorry and I don’t know why, and she scowls and says “no,” like I’m wrong to feel weird about it. I hope I am, but I’m not sure. She kisses me. We kiss. I think it’s fine but I really don’t know because a few minutes after it’s over, she leaves. OK, it’s 5:00 in the morning, so that’s fine, but it still feels a little abrupt. And when she gets home she messages me “sweet dreams,” so it wasn’t weird enough for her to ice me out completely. But a few days pass and we don’t talk much and I ask if she wants to hang out again and she agrees but it just doesn’t happen. And every time I think about any embarrassing aspect of that night — the question I asked her, the kiss itself, the moments afterward with her staring at the ceiling, the way she stepped out the door without really smiling as she said goodbye — I feel fucking humiliated and I shut my eyes and press my palms into my eyelids so hard I see color. I am not sure what happened. Maybe I am a truly awful kisser or I did something weird while it was happening. Maybe my self-consciousness was a massive turn-off. I’m not sure what in particular screwed things up, because everything was going so well before, and even if things did get a little weird, was that really enough to undo the emotional intimacy we achieved before? Or maybe that wasn’t real emotional intimacy; maybe it was just one touchy girl and a lot more physical attention than I was ever used to. But what I do know is that my persona as a writer is inextricably linked to every other aspect of my personality and life, including dating. Every person I meet, I wonder what exactly they think about me, not just general feelings of like/dislike but extremely specific details. I strive
to remember and write down everything that happens to me. I wonder about old friends, I speculate about future friends, sometimes I think about every single person I know and wonder what everyone is individually doing at this very moment and what they did yesterday and years ago and what they’ll do years from now and I become overwhelmed and want to pass out so my head isn’t filled with so many unanswerable questions. In sitcoms, the characters go on dates with new people every episode, and every new guest star is a caricature — “the one who’s obsessed with model trains” or “the one who’s attractive but dumb.” At the end of each episode, the guest star leaves and Monica Geller or Jessica Day or Ted Mosby moves on. But I can’t move on like that. This is part of why I don’t date regularly. As much as I might yearn to flirt at parties and sleep around, I am not someone who can, because I am seriously self-conscious, and I don’t have the ability to forget anyone or flatten them into a two-dimensional guest star in my life. As a writer who strives to be a good person, my stubborn penchant for imagining the vast complexity of everyone’s lives is helpful. But as a 20-year-old who sometimes wants almost desperately to be in a loving long-term relationship, it’s shitty. It’s very frequently my absolute favorite quality about myself, but in times like these, it’s my least favorite. So there I was sitting with a girl who really liked me and I couldn’t make a move because I was obsessively worrying about what would happen and what she would think and what could go wrong and what she could tell her friends about me. I was paralyzed everywhere, wanting and feeling but physically unable to do what I needed to do. What I try to remind myself now is that this is still a transitional period. As I meet new people and date more, I’ll learn to get out of my own head. I will learn to care more about what I want than what other people want, to be selfish but in a healthy way. I’ll learn to forget the people who deserve to be forgotten for their ultimate insignificance to my life. And one day, I will be in a relationship that doesn’t require so much constant scrutiny and self-consciousness. But on the worst days, I am worried that it will never happen, and that it will be because of me. It will be because of my insistence on thinking of people as individuals with a dizzying, incomprehensible array of hopes, dreams, fears and particular reasons they feel the way they do about me.
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
7B
I’ve Moved Around a Lot by Lydia Murray, Daily Staff Reporter
A
s someone who dreads the inevitable question of “Where are you from?” I’ve learned a crafty answer to the complicated question. For people I will never see again, I’ll say I’m from Michigan, citing a city I lived in for at least a year or two. Sometimes, if I’m feeling bold, I’ll lie and make up a hometown, usually a place I’ve at least visited — Baltimore, Connecticut or Auckland. During classroom introductions, my M.O. is omitting the hometown part of the line of questioning and hoping no one notices. But for those who I will see on a regular basis, I have to at least try to tell the truth: I don’t have a hometown. “It’s complicated” I often start, followed by “I moved around a lot” or “I was born in Michigan, but I lived overseas for a lot of my life.” This, of course, always leads to follow up questions of where and when, but then most people forget without truly understanding. Growing up around the globe was the most incredible, rewarding experience I could have asked for. In my lifetime, I have lived in three countries and nine houses. I’ve traveled to more countries than the number of years I’ve been on this earth by a margin of almost 10. I’ve spent Thanksgiving watching the sunrise over the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia; Christmas in Auckland, New Zealand, at a McDonald’s, waiting to catch a flight to Christchurch; and New Year’s watching the fireworks off the banks of Venice. But with all the glory and adventure associated with my third-culture kid life, there are hardships that have left scars on my personality. I’ve lost more best friends than most kids have in a lifetime. No one outside of my immediate family can really claim they’ve known me my whole life. I don’t have a specific place to call home. While most kids counted down the days to summer, I dreaded it, because a summer never passed when a friend
— or myself — didn’t move away. I remember numerous days spent crying as yet another best friend moved away. And this sentiment carried over into my life at college. Coming to the University of Michigan, I thought finally I would have an uninterrupted four years where no one would leave me, but this illusion was quickly shattered. At a school with a 97-percent retention rate, two of my friends made plans to transfer. With a class size of approximately 6,000, this meant just 180 people would leave — and I was best friends with two of them. During my last week of exams, I watched all of my friends go home for the summer as I prepared to remain in Ann Arbor, with my family still 7,000 miles away. I tried my best to keep myself together as I watched my best friends pack up their rooms, knowing they would not be returning. Somehow I managed to hide my despair as I waved goodbye after they packed their final boxes, but as soon as their backs were turned, I ran up to my room to wallow. This wasn’t supposed to happen here. I was supposed to have four whole years. A friend told me the other day that she thought I hated her when we first met because I was so quiet. I’m sorry to anyone if I seem that way. It’s hard sometimes to let myself make friends when I live with the constant expectation that they will just leave again soon. And friendships are not the only difficult aspect. In part, I’ve come dislike most holidays since returning to the United States. You could argue that I’ve simply become spoiled from my glamourous travels, but my issue mostly stems from a lack of real tradition or sentiment attached to them — especially Thanksgiving. Last year at Thanksgiving I discovered what it is like to be the only person living in South Quad. Fun fact: If no one else is using the showers, there is no warm water. That weekend I watched Netflix and called home at a predetermined time, accounting for the 12-hour time difference to
see my family enjoying the few days off with a vacation in Gui Lin, China. I would check Instagram and Facebook and see other people’s family photos and golden turkeys, while hiding under the covers in my empty dorm room. With every passing holiday my first year in college, I was reminded of what normal kids do — Memorial Day barbecues, giant Christmas parties with extended family, New Year’s bashes with hometown friends. These are all things I didn’t feel like I missed out on until suddenly I had no family and no adventure to supplement traditional activities. But this year, Thanksgiving will be different. Instead of 20 hours via plane from me, my family is a 30-minute drive down the highway — with no traffic. I can go home not only for Christmas but for Mid-Autumn Festival and Thanksgiving or just to do laundry. Nonetheless, this new home isn’t my hometown. I don’t have childhood memories playing in the backyard. I have no childhood friends waiting. Those memories and those people are scattered in India, China, Singapore, the United Kingdom and many others. But just because I lack a hometown doesn’t mean I lack a home. Home may not be a city filled with a string of memories dating back to my first steps. It may not come with a collection of friends who have known me since kindergarten. But home is where I walk in the door to be greeted by my energetic Border collie. Home is where I can eat rice and stir fry every day while laughing at the dinner table with my sisters. Home isn’t about the place, it’s about the people, the feeling and the atmosphere. And this new home in Random Suburb No. 9 is only temporary. Already my family discussions center around the next step, the next place. Los Angeles, Rio, Stockholm, Tijuana. But no matter if home is thousands of miles away or just a few blocks down the road, I know it will always be there for me.
ILLUSTRATION BY ELISE HAADSMA
8B
Wednesday, September 28, 2016 // The Statement
A counselor puts her paint covered palm to the camera after a paint throwing game.
Tie-dye puts a bit of color to a camper’s hands.
Black unit, the oldest campers, put their hands together after a tie-dye session at Arts and Crafts.
A camper flashes her hands soaked in color.
V I S UA L S TAT E M E N T:
CAMP KESEM PHOTOS BY JEREMY MITNICK
Camp Kesem is a non-profit organization that provides a free summer camp for kids affected by a parent’s cancer. I’ve never encountered a more positive, welcoming and loving environment, and I’m proud to spread the CK magic. At Camp Kesem, our hands get dirty a lot, and whether it’s from working with tie-dye or throwing paint, dirty hands mean everyone just did something fun. In this photo, campers hold hands during a game of human twister.