Communicator: Volume 44 Edition 1 by The Communicator

A STUDENT VOICE

The Communicator Magazine November 2017

November 2017

The Communicator Magazine November 2017

24 Hours of Solidarity

Enraged with continous acts of racism throughout the community, University of Michigan graduate student, Dana Greene Jr. decided to take a stand.

Pieing For A Cause

Community High students and staff gather to celebrate the funds they’ve raised for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society – by throwing pies in teacher’s faces.

Edgar Osorio: Student, Athlete, Brother, Immigrant

Former illegal immigrant and Skyline football player Edgar Osorio’s continuing battle for American citizenship.

About the Cover

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NEIL BEVERIDGE

José, a Mexican citizen, stands behind the wall that separates him from the U.S. and his sister who lives there. José, like millions of Mexicans, South and Central Americans, has been cut off from family members due to the strict border regulations imposed by the U.S. on the U.S. Mexico border. Since the passing of the first border regulations in the 19th century, the U.S. has steadily increased regulations on who can immigrate to the United States. Recently, under the Trump administration, border regulations have been implemented to a degree higher than the U.S. has ever seen. This increased regulation continues to make it harder for immigrants to enter the U.S., while increasing the division between families spread across borders. The border wall that José stands behind is one barrier out of many that in total cover approximately 600 miles from California to Texas; the wall, along with hundreds of miles of treacherous desert, continues to make crossing into the U.S. a very dangerous task, killing hundreds of people each year. One organization, going by the name of Border Angels, seeks to end unnecessary deaths in the desert by placing lifesaving water and food along well-traveled migrant paths.

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Unicorn Surgeon

Dr. Jennifer Romano, heart surgeon, reflects on her unlikely career and gender barriers inside the operating room.

Women are Watching

Two local teens co-found “Women are Watching” campaign in hopes of raising awareness and providing solutions to sexism within the community.

Learning Self-Love

Camille Konrad discusses her personal experiences with body image, how she learned to love herself and her body, and how you can too.

November 2017

Letter from the Editors Dear Readers, At the annual opening ceremony for Community High School students, our school focuses on a theme for the year. Two years ago was “The Sweet Life,” last year was “A Time for Action,” and this year is “Gratitude.” At The Communicator, we are grateful for the opportunity to share the stories that surround us and for this platform to share our perspective. Our own theme for this first edition is “On the Border.” The front cover is a photograph of a man at the border between Mexico and the United States. Our country is “On the Border” of Mexico, which translates to the focus of the articles written about immigration and DACA in this edition. From another angle, however, we are also “On the Border” of social revolution and environmental disaster. In our community, we have seen young people rally to make a push for change. Throughout this edition, you will find a number of articles casting a spotlight on student activism. From starting organizations for women, to walking for suicide prevention, to mobilizing with Planned Parenthood, students have been busy at work. You will also find coverage of the recent hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena that to us underline a much greater problem. The destructive weather is forcing us to look harder at climate change and what it can mean for our daily lives. We believe this is a transitional period for our country, and so now especially, we want to record the unique voices of students and locals of Ann Arbor and the world. You will also hear the voices of several of our staff members. Our staff speaks about topics such as women’s rights and gun violence. Members of our staff also delved into their family and local history — discovering stories of immigration, growing up, and philanthropy. We hope that you feel the importance of the voices projected in this edition, and that you take these stories with you. We are “On the Border” for change in this new school year. We hope you enjoy flipping through the pages of this edition just as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Your Editors, MARY DEBONA, GRACE JENSEN, ISABEL RATNER, AND MEGAN SYER

Print Editors-in-Chief

Mary DeBona Grace Jensen Isabel Ratner Megan Syer

Mission Statement: The Communicator is a student-run publication and an open forum established in 1974 and created by students at Community High School. The staff of The Communicator seeks to recognize individuals, events, and ideas that are relevant to the community. The Communicator journalists are committed to working in a manner that is professional, unbiased, and thorough in order to effectively serve our readers. We strive to report accurately and will correct any significant error. If you believe such an error has been made, please contact us. Letters of any length should be submitted via e-mail or mail. They become the sole property of The Communicator and can be edited for length, clarity, or accuracy. Letters cannot be returned and will be published at The Communicator’s discretion. The Communicator also reserves the right to reject advertising due to space limitations or decision of the Editorial Board that content of the advertisement conflicts with the mission of the publication. Opinions expressed in this publication are those of the journalism staff and not of Community High School or the Ann Arbor Public Schools.

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Tracy Anderson Staff

Web Editors-in-Chief

Mira Simonton-Chao Gina Liu Managing Editors

Abbie Gaies Ava Millman Sophia Rosewarne Andie Tappenden Design Editor

Ella Edelstein

Infographic Editor

Isaac McKenna Photo Editors

Alec Redding Cammi Tirico Copy Editor

Paige Duff

Social Media Editors

Atticus Dewey Claire Middleton

Business Manager KT Meono Art/Graphics Editors

Caitlin Mahoney Henry Schirmer Sports Editor

Shane Hoffmann Viv Brandt Shea O’Brien Content Editors

Elena Bernier Sam Ciesielski Madie Gracey Zoe Lubetkin Shea O’Brien Emily Tschirhart Sacha Verlon HR Managers

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NEWS YOU CAN’T JUSTIFY INJUSTICE: RALLY FOR CIAEEM SLATON

The downpour of rain on Oct. 4 did not drown out any frenzy of protest signs, drums, and flags that crowded on the side of the Blake Transit Center. By Gina Liu

FEATURE

A FIGHT AGAINST THE FOSSIL FOOL INDUSTRY It took Bill McKibben, a world-renowned environmentalist and journalist, around a decade after writing his first book on climate change to realize that he had i inorrectely analazyed the issue. By Elena Bernier

VOICE

STRANGERS AT HOME It was about a half month ago, sitting and watching my grandfather at yet yet another Chao family function, that I suddenly realized that I knew absolutely nothing about him. By Mira Simonton-Chao

A&E

SPORTS

NEWS

A & E

THE UNDERACHIEVERS TAKE THEIR PLACE AT EL CLUB The Brookly-based rap duo performed at El Club in Southwest Detroit on Oct. 8.. By Neil Beveridge

SPORTS

SKYLINE FOOTBALL DOMINATED HURON On Oct. 6, the Skyline Eagles welcomed their cross-town rivals, the Huron River Rats, to the “Eagle Nest.” By Cammi Tirico and Spencer Morgan HUMANS OF COMMUNITY

ERIC HUGHES “There was one huge street that was under construction for a while, we sort of made jokes about them never finishing it. Now, they probably never will finish it. I’ll probably go back someday. They need help.” By Paige Duff

SONG OF THE DAY

NOVEMBER In the song “November,” Tyler not only addresses his fears and anxiety about a variety of things, but also reflects on a time in his life called November, which is a metaphor for a place of geniune happiness.

By Suibhne O’Foighil

November 2017

24 Hours of Solidarity By Shane Hoffmann

Dana Greene protests in the Diag by kneeling towards the United States Flag for over 20 hours.

As midnight drew near, a group of over 200 University of Michigan students and faculty, as well as local residents swarmed the Diag. In the center, over the block ‘M’, two tents marked the focal point of the gathering. Kneeling before the awnings was graduate student Dana Greene Jr., his head and arms sprawled over a large white cooler as close friends periodically adjusted his battered knee pads. Greene had already spent nearly 15 hours in this position as he battled the sweltering 90 degree heat. He planned to spend 24 hours there. He explained his reasoning and intentions for his act in a letter penned to U of M president, Mark Schlissel. In his letter, Greene detailed his past experiences on campus as a student of five years. He discussed his outrage with the “anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-immigrant rhetoric” throughout the campus and across the country, as he vowed to no longer stand silently on the sidelines. He went on to state that he was not kneeling in disrespect to the country or anyone who has fought to defend it. “I will kneel in the Diag facing the flag in silent protest until there is nothing left in me,” he said. “I am kneeling because I want this campus and this country to acknowledge a fact that I know to be true. We are not and have never lived by the idea of our founding that ALL men are created equal. I am kneeling because we are better than this.” At 7 a.m., Greene was largely alone is his protest. He knelt with a yoga mat and a bottle of ice water at his side, MLive reported. Others held an umbrella over him to block out the sun. Throughout the day, the event picked up steam as students flocked around the block M in the Diag’s center, bringing food, drinks, and their support. U of M faculty passed by, thanking Greene and engaging in conversation with him. Medical personnel frequently appeared to check up on his health. The sun set and the scorching heat began to become bearable. A few hundred people surrounded Greene. Some students sat and some knelt. Some worked on homework and some simply sat quietly. No matter what they were doing, every individual’s support was felt. “[What resonates with me is] that somebody is willing to go through pain for me and for my sister and brother who go here,” said Ben Brown, a U of M student who spent most of his time kneeling side-by-side with Greene. “That they’re willing to suffer just so people can talk about our suffering. It’s just profound that he even has to do this for us, just so we can have a conversation. It is just really crucial. We are happy to be making a statement with this man.” Those in attendance had a wide array of reasons for their presence that night. For many, it provided an opportunity to be proactive. For others, it gave them a chance to connect and learn with others. “Sitting down, talking to my friends that are people of color and not being able to understand what they go through, but hearing what they go through and wanting to help and understanding that just showing my support and solidarity is at least a step in the right direction,” said U of M student Blake McWatters. Some protested using other methods, such as art. Student Madelyn Dutra spent over an hour creating a sidewalk chalk mural, capturing athletes Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry behind whom loomed a raised fist. Below the drawing, one statement were inscribed on the red brick: “Why I Kneel.” “I want to create imagery that they will see and notice,” she said. “Most people know what it’s about. They can come to their own conclusions.” After 20 hours of silent protest, Dana Greene Jr. rose to his feet, his goal accomplished. “I don’t know what kind of change is going to come from the university, and I’m hesitant to be optimistic about that part,” said supporter, Conner Van Der Beek. “But what I think this is, is this is solidarity. This is a peaceful protest. And we’re fighting noise with silence... This starts here. It doesn’t matter if we get an immediate response from the university, but we’re going to get an immediate response from the country. And it’s going to be support, solidarity, and respect.”

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEC REDDING

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November 2017

Voicing Opinions Planned Parenthood’s supporters and opposors gather at the Michigan State Capital for a day of workshops, marching, and lobbying. Community High School students were in attendance. BY CLAIRE MIDDLETON, CAMILLE KONRAD, AND SOPHIA ROSEWARNE

Supporters gather after Senator Warren’s speech on the Capitol steps.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAMILLE KONRAD

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Planned Parenthood supporters joined together on Oct. 17 in the Lansing Center for the organization’s “A Day of Action,” which entailed introductions, breakout sessions, lunch with legislators, a march, a rally, and lobby visits to legislators if participants chose to do so. This day was designed to unite and educate allies of Planned Parenthood on how to successfully lobby to protect the organization from recent criticism. Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that has been operating since 1916. It works to provide affordable reproductive healthcare as well as sex education for both men and women. Every year, Planned Parenthood provides two million patients with birth control; provides 4.2 million STD screenings; 631,000 cancer screenings such as breast exams and pap tests; and 1.5 million people with education and outreach. But Planned Parenthood also provides 323,000 abortions each year, which has brought it under fire by many pro-life activists, though abortions make up just three percent of Planned Parenthood services. H.R.354, a bill introduced on Jan. 6 2017, would prohibit the availability of federal funds to Planned Parenthood unless they certify that their clinics will not perform abortions or provide funds to any other entity that performs abortions — except in the case of rape, incest, or a physical condition in which the woman’s life is in danger unless an abortion is performed. In response, there have been many rallies, movements, and protests to block this bill and continue the funding to the health centers. According to advocatesforyouth.com, abstinence-only education is proven to be non-effective in their goal to keep teens from engaging in sexual activity or reducing teen pregnancies. Planned Parenthood has prevented an estimated 579,000 unintended pregnancies per year through their actions and education they provide to youth. Many of these educational programs are taught to high schoolers by peer-educators of the same age, making them point people within their community to whom students can reach out. “I stand with Planned Parenthood because it stands for what is right,” said Sabina Fall, CHS senior and Planned Parenthood Peer-Educator. “It stands for helping everyone, no matter their beliefs or sex or economic status. I stand with them because they are making a difference in the world for the better, and I can’t imagine my life without Peer-Ed and without all of the lessons and knowledge I have gained from Planned Parenthood.” The hundreds who attended this Day of Action regathered after breakout sessions to march from the Lansing Center to the steps of the Michigan State Capitol Building in public defense of Planned Parenthood. They were met by a smaller group of counter-protesters organized by Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, who were against abortion and for the defunding of Planned Par-

enthood A sea of pink flowed down the sidewalks as Planned Parenthood supporters in matching shirts chanted, “My body, My choice” as well as “Women’s rights are human rights,” while carrying signs reading “Hands off my birth control,” “I stand with PP,” ”Don’t monkey with Planned Parenthood,” “Don’t take away our care,” and more. The group reunited at the base of the steps of the capital, where Senator Rebecca Warren gave a speech. “I know that we collectively have the power and the passion to protect each other, to protect our friends, to protect our sisters, to protect our neighbors. We have the power,” Warren said. After Warren’s speech ended, the group went in two directions: back to the Lansing Center to participate in another breakout session and into the Capitol Building to lobby to politicians. “I am post-abortive, I had two abortions when I was young, I was pressured by each boyfriend, the pain doesn’t go away. It took me 21 years, a couple of months ago, to forgive myself,” Andrea Rofe said. Rofe was a participant in the Citizens for a Pro-Life Society counter-rally. After Rofe’s abortions, she entered a very self-destructive state. She became very depressed, had suicidal thoughts, and was binge drinking. Even in cases of rape, Rofe feels as though abortion is not the answer, as the women then have to deal with not one trauma but two. Among personal experience, religion was a common reason the counter protesters did not support Planned Parenthood. “Planned Parenthood wants to make the discussion about contraception not abortion, but really they have an anti-God, anti-child mentality, where Christians and people that believe in God believe that men are created in the image of God, therefore that’s a holy thing and we should protect life,” Davis Zastrow said. “God says you shall not kill, because we’re made in God’s image. When we rebel against that, we ask for trouble, we defy God’s image.” Amy Esper, a self-described feminist, feels as though Planned Parenthood has hijacked the feminist movement. “It’s not an arm of the government with welfare. It’s a retailer of abortion and I don’t think taxpayers need to pay for that. It’s a company like any other company in the United States,” Esper said. “My money should go where I would like it to go, not where they want it, because I don’t believe in abortion.” Senator Warren spoke to the importance of the elections in the years to come and urged supporters to give any time they can to campaign efforts and volunteering at Planned Parenthood. “We are not going to change the hearts and minds of some of these anti-choice politicians who think it’s their place to meddle in some of the most personal, private, and important decisions that we ever make. We can’t change their hearts and minds, but we can change their faces.”

November 2017

On Natural Disasters by Mary DeBona

The Aftermath of the Earthquake An 8.1 magnitude earthquake hit the western coast of Mexico on Sept. 7. Less than two weeks later, another struck the country. PUEBLA CITY, Mexico — Fighting to regain their balance, students scrambled out of their school. Others screamed as teachers helped to push students down a cramped staircase, which grew more and more crowded while some paused, unable to walk down them. One student jumped from a outdoor walkway that lined the second level of the school. Water splashed out of the sides of a fountain onto the surrounding pavement in front of the school; cars rattled and trees trembled. Staff members guided students to a football field where they cried and embraced each other. A voice over a megaphone told the students to “Settle down.” At 1:14 PM (CT) on Sept. 19, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook Mexico. The epicenter of the earthquake was 23 miles outside of Raboso, located in the state of Puebla. When the earthquake struck, many citizens were already taking part in earthquake drills, as it was the anniversary of an 8.0 magnitude earthquake that hit the state of Michoacan 32 years earlier. The recent earthquake followed an 8.1 magnitude earthquake struck off of the southwest coast 10

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of Mexico near the state of Oaxaca just a week and a half before. The earthquake affected major cities: Mexico City and Puebla City. Fiona O’Rielly, a Community High School student on an exchange in Puebla, Mexico, was one of the students who raced out of school on Tuesday afternoon. This had already been the second earthquake that she had experienced since she began her exchange trip in August. “I remember that I was drifting to sleep and all of a sudden, my bed started shaking and my host parents called for us and we all ran outside,” O’Rielly said. “But this one was just so much more serious and I didn’t really know what to think and it was probably less than a minute, but it felt like forever.” When the second earthquake hit, her host mother was on the way to pick her up from school. She was stuck in terrible traffic and witnessed cars crashing into each other when the ground began to shake. “I just can’t imagine being in a car because it was already hard to walk,” O’Rielly said.

On the drive home from school, her host mother noticed three girls standing on the side of the street trying to wave down a taxi. There wasn’t a single taxi in sight, so they let them into their car. Once the girls were inside the car, there were seven women stuffed into a five passenger Honda. “I’ll just always remember that because it was so nice of my mom to let them in,” O’Rielly said. “It was also nice to be with so many people after we heard about the earthquake; we all told our different stories and how it affected us differently because we were all in different places… I just think it’s crazy how one major experience can impact people in such different ways because we’ve all experienced it in different places.” Now, O’Rielly is doing what she can to help those who were hit the worst by the earthquake. She was able to spend her time that she didn’t have classes – due to safety checks that the building had to undergo before the students could return to school – volunteering. She helped to gather clothes, food, and medicine for a drive near her house. Another day, she went to a Jag-

Fiona O’Rielly helps to gather and organize donations. which were then sent out to victims of the earthquake. PHOTO COURTESY OF FIONA O’RIELLY

uar factory, where she organized more donations, which were then sent out to those in need. She was looking forward to driving to a nearby town, Morelos, where she would hand out donations collected at her church, but she missed the bus. All of the donations were brought to people who lost their homes during the earthquake. “It was terrible what happened, but I didn’t think that so many people would be willing to help,” O’Rielly said. O’Rielly said that she is reminded from her host family about how terrible the earthquake was. She heard about a school closer to the central part of Puebla City that collapsed and how children had to be

helped out. She heard about people close to her host family who lost a family member. Her host family formerly lived in Chiapas, a nearby town that O’Rielly had traveled to before and after the earthquake. “There’s this beautiful, yellow church [in Chiapas] and it’s very old and actually two weekends ago I got to see it… then we went back and got to see it,” O’Rielly said. “We were eating at a restaurant near there, and it lost the arch at the top. It’s just totally gone.” The injured church that she saw in San Cristóbal de las Casas is just one of the the many ways that she can still see the effects of the earthquake.

‘‘

It was terrible what happened, but I didn’t think that so many people would be willing to help.” |

November 2017

TOP LEFT: One of the many posters distributed around West Park at the walk to fight suicide reads, “#StopSuicide.” TOP MIDDLE: A hand-drawn poster that reads, “Together we create a path of hope” leans against a tent at the walk to fight suicide. TOP RIGHT: A Tim Horton’s cup holds Sharpies for people to write on a memory board. PHOTOGRAPHY BY EBBA GURNEY

Bringing Ann Arbor Out of The Darkness Survivors and supporters come together to bring awareness to suicide prevention. BY LOEY JONES-PERPICH AND EBBA GURNEY

Under the bright sun and clear blue skies on the morning of Sept. 23, 2017, suicide loss survivors gathered in Ann Arbor’s West Park ready to walk two-and-a-half miles to bring awareness to suicide prevention. Parents, partners, children, siblings, family members, and friends of suicide victims, along with people with personal struggles and supporters of the issue stood in West Park in the 92-degree heat, waiting for the walk to start at 11:00 a.m. After checking in, each participant had the option to fill out a tag that declared why they were walking. Some put names of family members and friends, some put the names of organizations, and some wrote that they were walking for their own health. A variety of tents and activities were scattered around the bandshell area, including a rock painting station and a memory board. A rack of beaded necklaces stood near the middle of the area, where participants could choose necklaces that had specific colors that explained their reasons for walking. “I’m walking because our family lost someone to suicide — unfortunately, just a handful of months ago — that had a really significant impact on our family and our community,” said Diana Quinn, Ann Arbor resident. Quinn works as a care provider, helping people with mental health struggles every day in her professional life. As it neared 11:00 a.m. and larger amounts of people started arriving at the bandshell

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area, the music got louder and the speakers started preparing their speeches. One of the speakers was Patricia Wheeler, the chair of Ann Arbor’s Out of the Darkness walk. Wheeler was familiarized with the type of resources that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers after her fiancé, Paul, died by suicide 12 years ago. “I get to honor Paul’s memory by helping other people through the experiences and hopefully helping to show folks that they’re not alone,” Wheeler said. Representative Debbie Dingell took to the bandshell stage with a powerful speech about mental health issues and the importance of awareness. “We need to, in this country, remove the stigma of people talking about how they feel,” Dingell said. After a list of loved ones lost to suicide by the participants in the walk was read and a moment of silence was given, the walk was almost ready to begin. Once the top fundraising individual and team were announced, walkers started gathering in a long line and began leaving West Park up the walkway lined with rocks that people had painted. Soon after, the hundreds of suicide loss survivors began the two-and-a-half mile loop up Miller Avenue to State Street and back to West Park on Washington Street. For some, the walk took over an hour, but volunteers cheered as walkers returned to the bandshell. Some participants cried, truly showing how much this walk meant to

them. “I really appreciate [the walk],” Roxie Richner said. “It is spreading awareness to something that isn’t really talked about, and I think it’s really important.” Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, over 44,000 Americans die by suicide every year. Sophia Gibson, 17, has struggled with mental health and suicidal thoughts. If someone was struggling with suicidal thoughts or the loss of someone to suicide, “I would just tell them, I’m so happy now,” she said. “You can find joy and you can be happy again, and it’s out there. You just need to keep struggling.” The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has been holding these Out of the Darkness walks nationwide since 2004, raising money to reach their goal of lowering the annual suicide rate 20 percent by the year 2025. Around 250,000 people will walk across the country this fall to help AFSP bring awareness and reach their goal. So far, the Ann Arbor walk has raised over $50,000. All of the money raised is used for suicide research and to educate communities about suicide prevention; 50 percent of funds stay in the local community. If you experience suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. You are not alone.

Seeking A Sanctuary Cheryl Valentine discusses what it means to go from a church to a sanctuary. BY MAZEY PERRY

What would it mean for The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor to become a sanctuary? Well I think it would mean standing up and putting our ideals into action. We believe in the worth and dignity of every individual and this would be a chance to stand up in the community and say that we are willing to take a stand against injustice. It would also give individuals within the congregation an avenue to actually be engaged in promoting justice. What needs to happen in order for the church to transition? For the past year we’ve really been laying the groundwork for it and basically what we need to do is to have a positive vote on Oct. 22, and there needs to be quorum of members of the church and the quorum needs to be voting in the affirmative 75 percent...Then after that there’s a sanctuary taskforce at UUAA and that taskforce has been exploring the logistics. Where will they be living? How will it affect people coming into the congregation? How will the space be used? What kind of security will we need to install? All those kinds of questions. The sanctuary guests will be staying in the Marley Room on the lower level of the church. The room is kind of tucked away but has very nice high windows with lots of light coming in with a sink. Right across from it there’s a bathroom with a shower. We’re thinking that the area outside the room will be sort of a common area with a couch and some comfy chairs so that can be used kind of as a conversation area. Would it be a whole family of people or single person? We have to be ready, we don’t know yet.

Could it be more than one person at a time? Yes there could, but I would assume it would be a single man or women with family connections in the community. Most of the people now who are being detained and threatened with deportation aren’t people coming here from somewhere else. They are people who have lived in our community for sometimes 20-30 years, and they have children who are American citizens and attend schools. They have their own houses, they have jobs, they own their own businesses, and the government has been telling them you’re okay all this time, and now all of a sudden since January, when Trump was elected they’re cracking down and telling those same people now you’re not okay. They now have to return somewhere where they don’t even have a clue what their going back to. When someone goes into sanctuary they cannot leave the church right? Correct, they can’t. But their family can come visit them? Yes. What is the legal aspect of this? If somone is in sanctuary, the ICE can’t come get them? There is actually no law, but it’s a custom for thousands of years that special places like churches, hospitals, and schools would be spaces where immigration authorities would not enter. There has been a protocol put down for ICE agents that they would respect that, but we don’t know, that could change. The thing with a sanctuary is it’s an act of civil disobedience…If [ICE] came after hours, then we would have a security system. The building would be locked, but there would be a camera outside and we would ask whoev-

er it was to identify themselves and if they were with a federal agency, and they had a properly-filled-out search warrant with the date and with the sanctuary guest’s name on it, then we would have to let them in. If they didn’t then there would be no way we would have to open the door, legally. So we would follow whatever’s legal and the only reason they would have a search warrant is if the sanctuary guest was suspected of having committed a crime. What needs to happen in order for someone to come out of sanctuary? What we’re hoping for is that before we would take someone into sanctuary, their immigration lawyer would have to think that there is a possibility that they could have a legal route to staying in the country if they have a little more time to work on it. So it just depends on how long it takes. In some cases people have gone into sanctuary and within three days the ICE folks have said, “Well okay we’ll give you a stay of deportation” and that is legal paperwork that they can stay and work on their case. Once they get that, they can come out. Others it has taken longer...So we take somebody in, our work isn’t done just offering them sanctuary, the work is really just beginning. You want to advocate for them, you want to generate a lot of media coverage so people know what the issue is.

GRAPHIC BY MAZEY PERRY Pictured behind is the Unitarian Univeralist Congregation of Ann Arbor’s logo. The image is representitive of a chalice, which is lit during every service.

November 2017

Local News By Morraina Tuzinsky and Grace Jensen

Forums Light the Night for Cancer Research

joy. Entertainers walked around juggling, dancing, walking on stilts, and performing tricks. While waiting for the walk to start, the crowd twirled their colored lanterns. The introduction ceremony started at 7:30 p.m., when organizers took the stage to talk about LLS and its impact on research and patient care. Terry O’Donnell, a Volunteer Chairman, encouraged event-goers to sign to support legislative change in the state of Michigan. He has been working to change health insurance law to include the more effective oral chemotherapy for cancer patients for the past five to six years, and has been volunteering for other LLS efforts for the past 20. He is disappointed that Michigan is one of the last states to make this change. However, he was glad for the Light the Night event.

“People that usually come to Light the Night are in some way connected with somebody that has one of the blood cancers, and so they’re always looking for things that they can do to help further the cause of finding better treatments and cures,” he said. “They are great advocates on behalf of the blood cancer patients once they know of a way in which they can help thousands of patients by talking to our representatives and getting the law changed.” As the night grew darker, those who were mourning a loved one bared a yellow lantern and were asked to hold them up; those who are survivors moved to the center of the crowd forming a circle before they held up their white lanterns; and everyone else was then asked to raise their lanterns to create a beautiful picture of love and supports for the cause.

The walk made a loop around the Huron River following Wall St., Broadway St., Fuller Rd., and Maiden Ln., about 1.3 miles. Buses and cars passing by the walk honked their horns in support. Soon, all that could be seen were the lit lanterns, truly lighting the night. After the marchers filed back into Riverside Park, Carrie Copeland, the statewide director for Light the Night, prepared to announce the total amount raised that night. Together, the group of supporters for Team Emma raised over $10,000 as of Oct. 4, and the LLS raised $134,894 from the Ann Arbor event. “I am absolutely elated by how much we’ve raised,” Copeland said. “It is so meaningful for patients and families and the research that we are going to be able to provide.”

Lanterns are raised in the air as a symbol of hope just before the walk begins.

A blown-up archway marks the beginning of the of the walk for Leukemia and Lymphoma, which covered over a mile start to finish. When the walk started, the sky was a beautiful blue; by the end, the lanterns were the only source of light. “It’s a really cool event,” Ian Keller, a senior in Thomas forum, said.

urvivors, supporters, and those mourning loved ones alike gathered at Riverside Park in the cool fall weather for the Light the Night fundraiser on Sept. 30. The event raised money, support, and awareness for The Leukemia Lymphoma Society (LLS), a group which funds blood cancer research and treatment. Light the Night is a particularly important event for Community High School (CHS) for a personal reason. Emma Rubenstein, daughter of CHS teacher Anne Thomas and sister of former student Hannah Rubenstein, passed away from leukemia in 2009. To support Thomas, many members of her forum attended. “I think [Light the Night] is a really great thing,” said Julia Ammer from Thomas forum. “For everyone to come together and

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support a cause is really cool.” Lukis Brod, also in Thomas forum, agreed, and added why he believes the cause is so important. “It helps people without insurance raise money to pay for medical bills, because they are really expensive. It’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment,” he said. “And especially with the threat of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] being repealed, it’s a big deal.” Additionally, Brett Kilgore’s forum, previously Strassel forum, has been fundraising for Team Emma for five years. They raised over $1,800 this year with their annual “pieing” event in which donations are collected in jars with teacher’s names, and the top three collectors are smashed face-first in cream pie on the back lawn of Community. They far surpassed their goal of $1,250.

Many members of Kilgore forum were also present at Light the Night to celebrate their fundraising success. “We’re here with Team Emma celebrating all of the funds that we were able to raise together as a forum and to show unity and support a great event,” said Kilgore, smiling while posing for pictures with his forum members. “Fiona [Lynch] really led the charge. She called me this summer saying that this is a priority that we’ve done the past four or five years as a forum, and just inheriting the forum, it was really cool to see that heart for service.” At the far end of the lawn, a VIP tent was set up with catered barbeque and drinks where Team Emma hung out before the walk started. A bouncy house and activities were set up for people of all ages to en-

A tent is set aside for quite reflection and remembrance of loved ones who had passed from

Performers mingle with the attendees and large lawn games are set up for the entertainment

blood cancer.

of young ones.

November 2017

PIEING

For a Cause Community High students and staff gather to celerbate their funds for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

BY ISABEL RATNER

Teachers Brett Kilgore and Steve Coron pose for the camera after being pied in the face for the Kilgore forum’s fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRACE JENSEN

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Community High Art Teacher Steve Coron was well prepared for being “pied.” Napkins stuffed up his nose shooting out in long strands - earbuds shoved inside his ears, and a napkin tucked inside his navy blue “Light The Night,” shirt, he anxiously awaited the arrival of two pies onto his face. “This is my debut at the pie contest,” he said. “I want to thank my mom for giving me the strength to get up here tonight. I’m so nervous right now that I just had to put my napkin on.” At the root of this “pieing” was a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS), organized by Brett Kilgore’s forum (previously Quinn Strassel’s). This is the fifth year the Kilgore forum has fundraised for LLS for Team Emma—who passed away at age 14 from Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. To fundraise, the forum gathered six jars for the six teachers in the running to be “pied.” Members from Kilgore forum went around during forum time to collect money from students and teachers and placed the jars in the main office during the day for students to donate. The forum set jars inside the main office with teachers names on them, and students could add money to the jar of the teacher they wanted to see “pied” throughout the day. The top three jars with the most money were the teachers who get “pied”, with one, two, or three pies, respectively. All funds go towards LLS, which recently held its Light The Night Walk, on Sept. 30.

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

November 2017

Community News By Isabel Ratner

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRACE JENSEN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MEGAN SYER

TOP LEFT: Brett Kilgore, teacher at CHS, after being pied in the face three times for coming in first place. TOP RIGHT: Steve Coron, teacher at CHS, after being pied in the face twice for coming in second place. MIDDLE: Liz Stern, teacher at CHS, and Dean Marci embrace after Stern was attacked by fellow friend and CHS teacher, Courtney Kiley, who came in third place for the event. BOTTOM LEFT: Courtney Kiley, teacher at CHS, after being pied in the face once for coming in third place.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRACE JENSEN

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The Light The Night Walk “brings light to the darkness of cancer by funding lifesaving research and support for people battling cancer,” as stated by organization’s website. The team has been represented by Hannah Rubenstein for Strassel/Kilgore Forum, Emma’s sister and a CHS alum, but this year after she graduated, senior Fiona Lynch took the reins. After connecting with both Rubinstein and Thomas, Lynch contacted the Ann Arbor liaison for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society and planned from there. She is adamant that Community stays involved in this fundraiser. “We definitely need to keep doing it,” Lynch said. “It’s an amazing organization, and I’m so grateful that I have been a part of it for five years now.” The Kilgore Forum attended the walk on Saturday at Riverside Park, along with community residents and students. “It was a really beautiful event,” Lynch said. “People had their lanterns, we walked a little over a mile, and it was a very supportive and loving environment.” Before the “pie-ing” began, a cluster of around 30 students crowded onto the back lawn as Lynch thanked everyone for their donations. CHS senior Ben Manheim was most excited to see CHS FOS teacher Courtney Kiley pied. Kiley was the first teacher up, coming in third place with $57.34 and one pie to the face. After being “pied,” Kiley bent over, sat back up, and saw fellow FOS teacher Liz Stern taking pictures of her. Kiley threw a bit of whipped cream at Liz playfully, and then picked up an entire pie from the ground. The two then ran through the crowd and around the back lawn, chasing each other with pie all over their faces. Next up was art teacher Steve Coron, whose jar received $76.83. While Coron was nervous, he was fortunate to have the opportunity, as coming in fourth place last year cut him off of being “pied.” Coron shouted “Alora” as two pies met his face. After Coron was “pied,” Dean Marci Tuzinsky came down to the front of the scene and was soon covered in pie by Stern. “Do not do what Liz did!” Tuzinsky yelled to students. “She's a little salty right now.” The final teacher to be “pied” was Kilgore forum leader and teacher Brett Kilgore, whose jar received $102.12. Kilgore believed that his colleagues “rigged” things by placing 20 dollar bills in his jar just to see him get “pied” three times. Kilgore’s pies came one on each side, and after each tin fell, he received another to the front of his face. Coron topped it off by placing an additional tin on the top of his head, as whipped cream sprayed into the air like dust. In total, students raised $236.29 to see their teachers “pied,” and Team Emma raised $10,013 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

The Kerrytown Concert House also acts as an art exhibit for local artists to showcase their work while the audience enjoys the performers on stage. PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEC REDDING

Sounds of Kerrytown Concert House BY RISHI NEMORIN

The bright yellow siding and green shutters of the Kerrytown Concert House give off an aura of an intimate and loving home. As you walk through the radiant red door, the feeling changes to one of humble elegance, and for good reason: Since the end of the 1980s, the Kerrytown Concert House has put on thousands of performances from many different artists, including Tamir Hendelman, Paul Keller, and Sean Dobbins. The venue was founded in 1984, with Dianna Relyea saving it from being demolished. Carl Brauer, a local business man, had the intent of turning the building into a parking lot to help further his business ventures. The city of Ann Arbor ruled this was against city ordinance, so Brauer had to find another use for the space. When Relyea saw the building, she knew just what to do with it. “Dianna had the vision of looking for a place where they could have small chamber music performances downstairs, and have space for teaching upstairs,” said Alison Halerz, the Executive Director of Kerrytown Concert House. “She started it from the ground up. All herself.” Halerz has been with the “House” for the past six years. She first worked as Director of Operations and then was promoted to

Executive Director. Halerz is also a classically trained pianist. In her downtime, she is the pianist for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. “I get to help people make music from behind the piano when I’m there, and from behind the desk when I’m here,” Halerz said. The first show that the House put on was by Bill Bolcom and Joan Morris, a husbandand-wife duo from right here in Ann Arbor. In 1984, the Kerrytown Concert House had no recognition within the music world, but after this famous pair graced its stage, the House quickly became a popular venue for music. Now, almost 35 years later, the House has to be selective with whom they schedule to perform. “We’re in our 33rd season, so we’ve been established enough so that we have a reputation, so we have people who contact us looking to perform,” Halerz explained. “Sometimes they’re the right fit, sometimes we have to say no.” Whether it’s a local theater troupe or a free jazz trio from Africa on the stage, audience members are sure to be amazed by their stunning performances. At the Concert House, the audience size tends to be smaller. The venue only holds only 110 people, so keeping every event in-

timate is natural in this setting. Halerz tries to make sure that the concerts are available to anyone who desires to hear beautiful music being made. “We have a really good audience,” Halerz said. “A really good, dedicated, well-educated audience that appreciates all sorts of music.” “We’re [a] nonprofit and we want to keep ticket prices low and accessible,” Halerz said. “Most of our concerts have five dollar student tickets, so we want to encourage people to come.” In October, the Kerrytown Concert House puts on their annual jazz festival, Edgefest. This four-day festival at the end of October is a celebration of new up-andcoming composers of avant-garde jazz music. The most recent Edgefest just passed. The theme for the twenty-first edition of this year’s festival was Drums On The Edge. The Kerrytown Concert House welcomes everyone with open arms to experience music in their home away from home. Their next concert is on Saturday, Nov. 25, featuring the Lincoln Trio in the PhoenixFest Gala Concert.

November 2017

Forum Day 2017 By Atticus Dewey

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CAITLIN MAHONEY

PHOTOGRAPHY AMY WILKINS

ABOVE: Anderson Forum falls into a more bonded group as they complete the low ropes course at Howell Nature Center. They also grew closer together by accomplishing several team-bonding activities such as fire building.

ABOVE: Kilgore Forum, “Kilgorum,” made effective use of their time by both bonding as a forum and preparing for Halloween with their pumpkin carving contest.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATELYN MILLER

LEFT: Dudley Forum prepares their breakfast after spending the night at Hudson Mills Metropark. Though they had been rained on throughout the night, their main bonding activity was making, hobo stew for dinner. ABOVE: Stern Forum grows closer by skating at the Yost Ice Arena. The forum then went to the Michigan Union Billiards room where they knocked around for a bit.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIANNE DUDLEY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRACE JENSEN

ABOVE: Root Forum plays bonding activities, such as “physiatrist” and “ten fingers,” in the Ann Arbor Skatepark. They quickly finished up when it began to rain.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNE THOMAS

ABOVE: Thomas Forum eats brunch at Angelo’s after the rainy night they had before. They bonded with food, walks, and a game of night groudies.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELENA FLORES

ABOVE: Starting with a scavenger hunt, the Flores orum spent the day at CHS playing board games and Kahoot while eating pizza and waffles.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KYLE MILLER

Johnson forum goes and walks the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

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November 2017

BY AVA MILLMAN

Detroit Lions fans from across the state meet at Eastern Market to share their love of food, friends, and football.

David Daniel, right, and Tamara Gaines, left, look out over their tailgate empire, which they have been building for over 25 years. For eight Sundays out of each year Daniel fills his two separate tailgate sites with 200 of his closest friends and family. “My tailgate allows people to come down from all cultures to come down, and to celebrate,” Daniel said. “Everyone can come down and kick it, and just have fun.” Daniel uses his massive tailgate party to showcase the resurrection of the Eastern Market neighborhood to all of his guests. “Our city is winning,” Daniel said. “Regardless of sports, it is winning now. We can enjoy the pistons downtown, we can enjoy the Red Wing’s new stadium, with the Tigers we have a little work to do, but our arts and theater are doing great. Everything is happening in downtown Detroit.” Coming into the matchup between the Lions and the Atlanta Falcons, both teams had undefeated records and Daniel was confident that the Lions could come out on top. “Our record is making us feel great because we are 2-0 currently,” Daniel said. “This is a big game. We are being tested against a team that is expected to be in the super bowl

The

Heart

Lion of a

Michelee Taylor flips chicken patties on a charcoal grill in front of her family tailgate. She cooked for over 50 of her relatives while they watched the Detroit Lions game on a TV attached to the outside of her RV. The 2017 season is Taylor’s first season hosting a tailgate at Eastern Market with her family, and she is already in love with the atmosphere. “I love it because of the people,” Taylor said. “You’ve got black, white, you’ve got all nationalities. Everybody is like a family, everybody is so friendly.”

Ella Patterson, center, celebrates the Lions 2-0 record before their game against the Atlanta Falcons. Patterson has made the trip from Waterford, MI to tailgate at Eastern Market for every single Lions football game for the past six years. “I have been here when it’s raining, snowing, hot, cold, I always come down because it’s the best party of the year,” Patterson said.

Wayne Watson, a self proclaimed “huge Detroit Lions fan,” enjoys one of the many vendor stations at the Eastern Market tailgates. Watson and his family come to Eastern Market for every Lions game at Ford Field to indulge in music, food, and drinks while watching the game. Many fans at Eastern Market are not there just to support the lions, but also the city itself. Watson believes that the Lions bring hope to the city of Detroit, and provide an identity that all fans can unite under. “Winning brings confidence, and this city needs confidence,” Watson said.

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November 2017

Across The Floor

CET actors take on a new challenge: dancing. BY ANDREA SCHNELL

fter four hours spent sweating and moving around in Community’s black box theater, a few CET actors decided to stay for another two hours to participate in Community Ensemble Theater’s (CET) new dance classes, taught by choreographer, Rachel Costantino. Costantino knows that to willingly dance for a total of six hours in a school that has only a few fans and no air conditioning speaks to the commitment these students have. The actors impressed her with their dedication. “It speaks to who you are,” Costantino said. Costantino and Quinn Strassel, the director of CET, talked about having dance classes when many CET students were having trouble finding musical theater dance classes that fit with their already busy rehearsal schedules. Costantino offered to provide classes every week after Sunday rehearsals, and Strassel jumped at the chance. “I wish that there had been something like this for me in high school,” Strassel said. “I had great acting and vocal training before college, but I still to this day really struggle with dancing.” The classes get back to basics, as Costantino believes it is never bad to review dance

fundamentals, even if some students have prior dance experience. However, most CET actors do not. The classes break everything down and go at a much slower pace than a traditional dance class at a studio would. The dance class starts with what is called “Across the Floor,” where Costantino addresses the details in simple moves and teaches terminology to the students. The class covers preliminary steps in ballet and jazz, both of which are fundamental for musical theater. “We did turns for about an hour,” Costantino said, “just on the left and the right [feet], really breaking it down step by step.” After “Across the Floor,” the class works on a combo — a dance routine students learn at the end of a dance class. Combos are similar to routines that may be be taught at auditions or seen in a show. The class learns a wide range of combos; they cover everything from “This is Halloween” from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” to the “Cell Block Tango” from “Chicago.” Loey Jones-Perpich, a sophomore in CET, wants to study musical theater in the future and is attending the dance classes to prepare. “By doing a new combo every week you

get so much exposure, and you get so used to being moved around, which is good in the future for auditions and different shows,” Jones-Perpich said. Even though Costantino said the classes go slow compared to an average dance class, they still are difficult for many students. “I think that [the dance classes] work you really hard. They are really intense,” said Aris Chalin, a junior in CET. Costantino said that if her students are sore, she is proud. At the end of the class, no matter how sweaty and sore the students feel, they stand in a line, hold hands, and end the class as many shows do — with a bow. Osorio, #56, and the Eagles walk off the field at Pickney HIgh School after a loss to the Pirates.

Edgar Osorio: Student, Athlete, Brother, Immigrant BY SHEA O’BRIEN

Rachel Constantino leads the class in stretching. Constantino offers a two-hour dance class to help CET actors who are interested in developing their dance training for musical theater.

The dance class stretches at the beginning of Sunday afternoon practice in the first-floor studio. Rachel Constantino believes that all levels of dancers benefit from reviewing dance fundamentals.

Rachel Costantino gives instruction as Max Klarman listens. Costantino gives dancers individualized tips to help develop their skills for musical theater performances.

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In the second week of August, every football team across the state of Michigan straps on the pads for the first time all year. Division I collegiate prospects to third graders in peewee leagues: they all take to the mid-summer heat to prepare for the upcoming season. However, the Skyline Eagles had one face missing on the gridiron that first week, as sophomore offensive guard Edgar Osorio spent the beginning of the season in court fighting off deportation. A Mexican-born immigrant, Osorio was brought to the U.S. illegally at the age of two by his parents. “I got here old school,” Osorio said. “We just hopped the border.” After ten years living undetected in the state of Michigan and two brothers born into American citizenship, the Osorio family was discovered. “2012, April 4, my dad, my brothers and I, we were stopped by a regular state cop in Ohio on the way to Cedar Point,” Osorio said. “They asked him for his license and all and he doesn’t have it you know. He wasn’t born here.” After being taken by the police to ICE office and being questioned, the family was free to go. But Osorio’s father, Edgar Osorio Sr. was taken to jail where he would stay for three months. Though he was not born here, Edgar Os-

“I GOT HERE OLD SCHOOL. WE JUST HOPPED THE BORDER.” orio would be protected under DACA. The act states that as as a student, present in the United States on June 15, 2012, and brought to the country before his 16th birthday, he is exempt from any deportation. However, Osorio carries more than just the burden of being an illegal immigrant. Osorio’s youngest brother has the developmental learning disability autism. “[My brother] looks up to me, and it’s a huge weight on my shoulders,” Osorio said. “He’s taught me a lot of patience and given me skills I wouldn’t have if he didn’t have his condition.” This burden weighed heaviest on Osorio on a night this past year when another high school student began making remarks about Osorio’s brother and his disability. “I told him, ‘Yo, you better watch your mouth’ and then I fought him.” The fight ended with Osorio in handcuffs, police custody, and worst of all a misdemeanor on his record preventing Osorio

from any chance of his application to be accepted into DACA. It was these cases that cost Osorio the beginning of football season and thousands of dollars towards immigration lawyers. For now the Osorio family is safe, and deportation threats are no longer imminent, however, they continue to tread on thin ice. “If any form of crime is committed, it’s deportation automatically,” Osorio said. “Just like that. One small thing, a misdemeanor, jaywalking, it’s possible deportation.” Osorio’s father is now out of jail, and lives here in Ann Arbor on a green card continuing on the path to citizenship. Osorio and his mother are also now attending regular court cases bringing them closer to a permanent stay, and his brothers both continue to live their lives as normal American kids. Osorio just keeps going to school and playing football, continuing to try and perfect his craft and do what he loves as a starting lineman for the J.V. Skyline Eagles. “We all come from different places, have different struggles but if I keep working hard [and] doing the right thing, I’ll end up alright,” Osorio said.

November 2017

Taking a Knee BY SHANE HOFFMANN

- Kaepernick gains attention for his protest and explains his reasoning for his actions. Aug. 26 and 28

Aug. 14 and 20. 2016 - San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick goes unnoticed while sitting during national anthem.

In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick gained national attention for his protest of the anthem. Now, over 15 months later, a new president holds office, and the lines between the worlds of sports and politics have nevered been more blurred.

- U.S.A. Women’s soccer player, Megan Rapinoe, kneels during anthem in support of Kaepernick. Sept. 4

Sept. 1 - Kaepernick and teammate, Eric Reid kneel during anthem. Meanwhile, Seattle Seahawks defensive back Jeremy Lane sits during anthem.

- 49ers and Rams players raise their fists in protest alongside a kneeling Kaepernick and Reid. Sept. 12

Sept. 11 - Members of the Seahawks, Dolphins, Chiefs, and Patriots demonstrate during anthem.

Sept. 18 - More 49ers join Kaepernick, Dolphins continue protest.

- Four Eagles’ players raise fists during anthem. Sept. 19

- Kaepernick featured on the cover of Time Magazine. Sept. 22

Sept. 21 - Two Phoenix Mercury players, as well as entire Indiana Fever team, kneel during the national anthem.

- Trump tweets: “NFL owners don’t want to pick (Kaepernick) up because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump. Mar. 20

Oct. 4 - NBA teams, Rockets, Knicks, and Celtics stand united during the national anthem.

- Trump fires back and forth with athletes and others on Twitter. Teams protest by kneeling, locking arms, and staying in locker rooms or tunnel during the national anthem. Sept. 24

Sept. 23 - Trump begins Twitter tyrade as he calls for the firing of kneeling athletes. Refers to them using profane language.

Trump stands divided against protesting athletes including Malcolm Jenkins, Lebron James, Marcus Peters, Jamie Collins, Tina Charles, Bruce Maxwell, Tony Jefferson, and Colin Kaepernick (center). PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHANE HOFFMANN

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November 2017

Trump

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Athletes

November 2017

Giver Molly Dobson has dedicated her life to helping others. BY ROXIE RICHNER

hen Molly Dobson was about to turn 21 and graduate from college, her father asked her a question that changed her life forever. He was visiting her at her sorority to wish her a happy birthday when he asked Dobson what she wanted to do with her life. She told him that she was going to be a flight attendant. Her father’s response was, “Sis, do you think that’s doing enough for your country?” Within a week of her father’s challenge, Dobson signed up to be enlisted in the Navy. She became a part of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). “I am so proud of that,” Dobson said. “I really made the right choice.” Now 94, Dobson is one of the most celebrated philanthropists in Ann Arbor. Her main focus and passion is on education and funding scholarships. “With scholarships,” Dobson said, “you could change a community, change a state, change a nation, make an international impact.” Dobson also believes strongly in women’s rights. “I have the feeling that women haven’t gotten a fair share, ever, and we need to move forward,” Dobson said. “There’s nothing inferior about us.” When Dobson donates or invests in organizations with no women in positions of power, she makes an effort to point that out and change it. She has written letters to the board of directors, or the CEOs, suggesting that they diversify their leadership. “Sometimes I didn’t get any response, but the one response I did get was from a local one,” Dobson said. “[The president of the organiza-

LEFT: Molly Dobson, age 21, in full Naval uniform in 1944. RIGHT: Dobson today at age 94. PHOTO COURTESY OF MOLLY DOBSON

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tion] called me up and he said, ‘Okay Molly, you give me a list of five women in this community that you think could handle this job and do justice to it.’ They actually chose one of my selections. You don’t very often have that sense of accomplishment.” Since Dobson is such a believer in equality, she finds the current political climate distressing. “I think we know what we don’t like, but I don’t think we really know what we want,” Dobson said. “It’s just so big, and so vast, and there’s so much to worry about. It just seems as though we aren’t properly resolving our problems, and we don’t have the leadership to properly resolve those problems. It’s upsetting.” Dobson strongly believes in the power of young people to enact change to combat those issues. She hopes that this coming generation follows their passions to make a difference. “Do what you can with the gifts that you’ve been given,” Dobson said. “Do what you can to enhance life, whether it be in your family, or in your community, your state, your country, your world. Just assess what’s out there and how you fit in, and do something. Don’t sit back and worry about it. Do something.” In addition to all of her accomplishments, Dobson has also experienced great loss. She has outlived two of her three children and her husband. The losses she’s encountered have helped to make her a better, stronger person. “You don’t anticipate losing somebody younger than you are,” Dobson said. “It gives you a lot to think about your own life. How precious it is, and what you want to do with it. And rather than wasting time and grieving and doing nothing, you’re fighting back.” Even while working hard to create change in the world, Dobson has realized it’s important to enjoy life. “Life is pretty serious,” Dobson said. “Have fun! That’s important too. Balance.” Dobson’s wisdom and legacy will live on to inspire generations.

‘‘

Do what you can with the gifts that you’ve been given.” |

November 2017

A Fight Against the Fossil Fuel Industry

World-renowed enviromentalist and journlaist, Bill McKibben, explains how the fossil fuel industry has spurred along climate change, and what can be done to slow it down. BY ELENA BERNIER

he time it took Bill McKibben, a world renowned environmentalist and journalist, to realize that he had mis-analyzed the issue of climate change was around a decade after writing his first book on the topic. The theory was that McKibben and the rest of the scientific community were engaged in an argument regarding whether or not climate change was real. They thought that if they kept arguing, eventually the politicians and leaders of the country would realize that they were ignoring the greatest threat to the planet. But they weren’t in an argument, they had won that long ago. By the mid-1990s, the scientific community was in a strong consensus of what the problem was. “We weren’t really in an argument, we were in a fight,” McKibben said, at a talk given at the University of Michigan in October. “And the fight was [against] the fossil fuel industry — the richest force on the planet. And it was able to use that money and power to prevail in that fight, despite having lost that argument.” But, the fossil fuel industry already knew what they were doing to the planet. Exxon, an oil company in the U.S., employed the country’s best scientists to research climate change. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, they knew exactly what was going to happen to the, if they continued on their trajectory. The scientists were spot on, and the company believed them. Exxon began building higher oil rigs to compensate for the rising sea levels that they knew were coming. “But, what they didn’t do was tell the rest of us, what they did instead was invest millions of dollars in deceit and disinformation that has kept the completely pointless debate about whether or not global warming was real alive,” McKibben said. Both sides, science and the fossil fuel industry, both knew what the answer was — they both knew that climate change was real, but the fossil fuel industry refused to admit it. And that is partly the reason why the world is in the situation that it is in now. “One has to talk frankly about the scale and the pace of the problem that we face, when asked to be realistic about where we are,” McKibben said. “And where we are, well, we’re going to walk in the valley of the shadows for a minute here, because it’s not good.” Humans have increased the planet’s temperature by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, this doesn’t sound like much, but it turns out that it is a big stress factor in the ex-

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tra heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere due to the excess carbon being produced by burning coal, oil, and gas. According to McKibben, the extra heat is the equivalent of 400,000 Hiroshima sized bombs a day. “We know it’s that heat because of what it’s done. Look up at the Artic, we’ve lost half of the summer sea ice there, think about the heat required to do that, to melt a continent-size chunk of meters-thick-millennial-old ice,” McKibben said. “Think about the ocean, after all we’re an ocean planet. The extra carbon we put in the atmosphere is absorbed by the [ocean], and when this is absorbed it changes the chemistry.” The oceans are now 30% more acidic than they were 40 years ago. This is a staggering change — a change that is causing unbelievable damage to the planet. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on the planet, is now only half as big as it was 18 months ago. The increased heat has also done it’s damage. “Warm air holds more water vapour than cold air, if you want one fact to understand in the 21st century, that’s the one to pick,” McKibben said. “It means in arid areas we get much more evaporation than we’re used to, hence more drought. There’s a lot of death globe now, we see those droughts kick in with the most devastating effects.” The worst drought in history has occurred in what was once called the Fertile Crescent. Spanning across the middle East, the effects of this drought have been huge. “It seems to be one of the triggers for the civil war in Syria that now is sending refugees screaming across the planet,” McKibben said. All around the world areas are experiencing droughts causing forest fires like the world has never seen before. And all this water that has been evaporated into the atmosphere is let out in the form of rain on other parts of the world. “Rainfall [has occured] on a scale that was once impossible to imagine, except on a world where we’ve begun to change. When Hurricane Harvey came to Houston, it obliterated the U.S. record of largest rainfall ever [with] 54 inches of rain,” McKibben said. And those records were challenged just 10 days later, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, leaving the entire island without power and causing unbelievable damage. In addition, other parts of the world have gotten too hot to simply live. In the last year, Ahvaz — a city in Iran with a population of 1.1 million people — re-

ported the highest ever reliably recorded temperature of 129 degrees Fahrenheit. “That’s too hot to work, to hot to sleep in, basically too hot to live for any real period of time,” Mckibben said. “That is the reality of the world in which we currently live.” And these are only some of the effects of the changing climate. “The world made its first real small effort to do something about this in Paris two years ago,” McKibben said. “[But], even if we followed every single promise that everybody made in Paris, we would still be on a trajectory to increased temperatures by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would be enough to not just cause problems, but to threaten the civilizations that we know today. We are up against the biggest problem that we have ever faced. We have to do something about it now.” But there is good news. The scientific community knows what needs to be done. Around 10 to 15 years ago, McKibben recalls that all they knew was that the world had to get off of fossil fuels. Although the world is inevitably heading towards rising temperatures, the answer to softening these effects lies in renewable energy. In the last ten years, McKibben credits engineers to doing the most to make renewable energy affordable. Last year Denmark’s generated half the power it used with wind, using the same resources available to the United States but put to good use. Last year, while McKibben was in East Africa for The New Yorker, he got to watch places that never had power before, skip the fossil fuel age, and went straight to renewable energy, getting electricity from solar panels on the roofs of their huts. “It was incredibly moving to watch, incredibly moving to see people have their first glass of cold water,” McKibben said. Although the scientific community is in consensus of the problem and solutions to it, the fossil fuel industry has slowed the progress of saving the planet. But still, with rising awareness and huge steps being made in renewable energy, there is hope for the future. “Green power is now the cheapest way to produce [electricity] all over the world,” Mckibben said. “We can do this, I know we can do it.”

November 2017

On Medicine by Abigail Gaies

Returning Resident Elissa Gaies, single mother and second-year resident at St Joe’s, reflects on her residency experiences.

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It’s not just about knowing material and applying it, but about who Elissa Gaies is and how I interact with people and make them feel about the situation. RY

lissa Gaies, single mother of two, is not the average medical resident. Most residents go from college to medical school and then straight into a residency program. Gaies graduated from college and medical school, but then waited just over a decade to decide to go do her residency and be a practicing doctor. In 2004, after graduating from Harvard Medical School, all signs pointed toward becoming a stay-at-home mom to raise her family. She began working at the Veteran’s Health Administration in 2012, a few years after her divorce, but in 2015 she decided to quit that job and begin her residency at St. Joseph Mercy. What exactly is a residency? According to Gaies, it is similar to an apprenticeship. After four years of college and then four years of medical school, you practice being a doctor for three to five years. “Instead of learning in the classroom, you learn by doing in the hospital,” Gaies said. “The first year is called an internship and you’re the lowest man (or woman) on the totem pole: the dreaded intern.” The next two years are junior and then senior resident. Surgical residents continue for two more years, but Gaies is only doing a general residency. The first year, the intern year, is spent mostly doing scut work. Scut is the busy work: paperwork, coordinating things, talking to people, delivering lab results. Scut includes things that are not important enough for the head doctors to worry about, tasks that do not necessarily take a medical degree. The second and third years are supposed to be more supervising than scut, but some residents end up continuing scut on various services. Gaies specifically does a lot of “running around.” She talks to the patients, trying to find out why they are there and what is bothering them. She examines them, orders tests and labs to investigate, and analyzes the results. She also talks to the patient’s family and writes a lot of notes. “In a lot of ways you feel like you are just spinning your wheels and running in circles,” Gaies said. There are many differences between her current and her old job. She previously had a desk job at the VA. She could come and go as she pleased, except for meetings, and her work could be done pretty much anywhere and by anyone with a medical degree. Now, all that has changed. “What I love about the work I do is that I am moving around all day and talking to all different people,” Gaies said. “The thing is that the person I am — my personality — matters for what I am doing now. It’s not just about knowing material and applying it, but about who Elissa Gaies is and how I interact with people and make them feel about the situation.”

Gaies works “insane hours.” She gets to the hospital before 7 a.m. — which is an improvement from 6 a.m. last year — and does not leave until 10 p.m. some nights. She works shifts, and while she is supposed to get out at a certain time everyday, she rarely does. Although staying late is not ideal, she enjoys her residency “in some ways more than [she] thought [she] would.” She had been excited to do her residency for awhile before she started it, but it turned out to be more enjoyable than she thought. “I absolutely love taking care of patients, and I love the team dynamic and the medicine,” Gaies said. “But I really hate being away from my girls and I hate that there is so much I want and need to know and no time to learn it. I guess it all comes back to time, and how there’s never enough.” Besides seeing her daughters less than she is used to, she only really finds one other unenjoyable part of her residency: the long white coat. “When you are a medical student you get a short white coat and getting that long white one as a resident always seemed so cool to me,” she said. “It’s a symbol of ‘making it.’” She rarely wears hers anymore, in part because the pockets are so big and get heavy with the accumulating things that end up in them. “Plus I think that it is a barrier that defines a hierarchy in the relationship between the doctor and patient,” Gaies said. “I want the patients to look at me as a person just like them, but with the medical knowledge that they don’t have.” Waiting over 10 years between graduating medical school and beginning her residency has had both negative and positive effects on her. One negative effect is that she does not feel up-to-date on her medical knowledge: she has forgotten some things in the long time from learning them, and also medicine has changed so much. “We have more drugs, new ways of treating things, and our thoughts on things have evolved,” Gaies said. “When I was learning medicine, being diagnosed with HIV was a stigma and a death sentence. We barely had drugs to treat people and if you were even able to take the drugs, you had 10 pills to take three times a day. Now, it’s a chronic medical issue that the family doctor can manage.” This is just one example of how medicine has changed. Others include new technologies that have be created and the discovery of new diseases. There are also positives to the age gap. “I have a better sense of life,” Gaies said. “I understand how so many adults can do a really bad job about taking care of themselves. I’m not preaching to my patients so much as connecting with them and sharing the extra knowledge I have by knowing the medicine that they don’t.” At this point in her life, Gaies can appreciate the work she is doing more than if she were fresh out of medical school — and a decade younger. “I

love being an older resident,” she said. “I feel so good doing the long hours for all the right reasons.” This job has definitely affected her other job — being a mother. “It sucks,” Gaies said. “To be honest, I often ask myself what I was thinking. I can do one or the other well, but both at the same time has proven to be challenging.” She admits that at times she is considered taking time off from her residency so that she can take care of her daughters. “I know that I am setting a good example and helping them become more independent and self sufficient, but I also know that there are things that they are missing because of my being overstretched,” Gaies said. Some of the results of her being overstretched are her not checking her email for over a week and not providing enough home-cooked meals for her daughters. She feels that she is not getting the basics covered, let alone the other things they may need. “And I miss driving them places,” Gaies said. “I know that sounds bizarre, but I love that time in the car with them and I love being such an important and present part of their daily lives. I like to think of this as practice for the next step because I won’t know everything that they are doing when they get to college.” There are times that they cope with this change better than others. “I think in general we are doing well, but there are times that things fall through the cracks and they get pissed at me,” Gaies said. “[This] makes my already self-disappointment worse. But they have also been so supportive and proud of me, and that feels so good. Really, really good.” If given the chance to do it differently, Gaies may have changed some things. She may have done her residency directly after medical school, but then she would not have been as mature or have the same point of view that she does now. “If I had waited until the girls were at a good place in terms of their lives and education there would never be a good time,” Gaies said. “And while I am constantly exhausted there would be no light at the end of the tunnel.” She believes that it is all worth it in the end if she can set a great example for her daughters. “I want my daughters to understand that there are rarely things in life that you can’t do if you work hard enough,” Gaies said.

November 2017

PRESCRIPTION Pain Killers WASHTENAW COUNTY TAKES STEPS TO EDUCATE AND PREVENT OPIOID DEATHS IN THE COMMUNITY. BY ELLA EDELSTEIN AND GINA LIU

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n elderly woman arranged almost a dozen prescription bottles on a gray cafeteria tray. She lifted the tray, balancing the bottles of various sizes, and handed it over to a police officer who then deposited the drugs into a red biohazard bag. Opioids — the type of drugs that this woman and 92 million adults in the country are prescribed — have killed more than 30,000 Americans in the past year, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. These deaths are statistically comparable to the number of Americans killed by vehicle accidents and gun violence. The Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network (Michigan-OPEN) is working to prevent these deaths and educate the community on why they are happening. On Sept. 30, they organized an opioid take-back event at Pioneer High School. This May, cities across Michigan participated in a drive which collected 15,000 unused opioids from surrounding communities. These drives are important because they offer an anonymous way to dispose of drugs that is not as environmentally threatening as say, flushing them down the toilet. So why are opioids — derived from the beautiful poppy plant — so dangerous? “There is definitely a relationship between people starting out on prescription opioids, and eventually moving to things like heroin, when prescription opioids aren’t accessible, or they become too expensive,” said Chad Brummett, director of Michigan OPEN and Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at University of Michigan. According to Brummett, the most commonly prescribed opioids today are hydrocodone (Vicodin), codeine, and oxycodone (OxyContin). When opioids are out in the community and in family homes, sitting unused in

medicine cabinets, they are accessible to people of all ages. Once accessible, they can be consumed unintentionally by young children or used recreationally by teens and adults. Since opioids are so addictive, patients quickly develop dependencies on the drugs they are prescribed. As addiction often goes, patients can start taking much more than the recommended dosage or combine medication and alcohol, resulting in an overdose. While an overdose is not always fatal, in Washtenaw County about thirty percent of overdoses resulted in a death, according to the Washtenaw County Public Health Department (WCPH). Michigan-OPEN’s efforts are particularly dire as our own community has experienced great loss from the epidemic. According to the WCPH, every day, one person in Washtenaw County overdoses on an opioid. Since 2011, about 330 people have died from said overdoses. Michigan prescribes more than the national average and has a higher rate of opioid-related overdoses, Brummett stated. Although doctors know that opioids are dangerous, they continue to prescribe them for procedures as minor as wisdom teeth removal. “I think it’s been common practice for many years, but really since the early 90s, we’ve seen a major uptake in prescribing,” Brummett said. “Unfortunately, as a culture, we have leaned probably too heavily on opioids.” In addition to overprescription, the epidemic more than likely takes root in the influence of America’s enormous and avaricious pharmaceutical companies. An article in the LA Times chronicles the revolutionary tactic of “12 Hour Dosing,” originally created by pharmaceutical company Pur-

due — manufacturers of OxyContin — as a marketing ploy. When patients complained that the pain killer was not effective through the recommended dosing period, the pills were created stronger, but not prescribed more frequently. While the larger doses provided more relief, they inflicted on patients even more agony: a 12-hour withdrawal cycle caused by increasing amounts of the addictive substance. The larger pills make patients — and anyone with access to their medication — more vulnerable to overdose. According to NBC, in September, the state of Washington filed a lawsuit against Purdue, blaming them for contributing to the opioid crisis and thousands of deaths. This is only one of a handful of such suits and there will likely be more to come. Rather than taking legal action, Michigan OPEN deals with the issues on the ground. Looking forward, they want to make sure citizens take action beyond the university’s events. “Our goal is to put ourselves out of business, and to stop making opioid drives the main mechanism,” Brummett said. “The truth is, everyday throughout the state of Michigan, you can actually safely dispose of even controlled substances. We’re interested in finding more novel mechanisms that would allow you to potentially dispose of your medications at home.” It is unlikely that opioids will be eliminated as a pain control option in the near future; they are an extremely effective tool for managing post-surgical pain in major operations and are largely unmatched. Still, if trends continue, the collective health of Washtenaw County — and the rest of the country — will continue to be at great risk.

November 2017

On Medicine by Abigail Gaies

A Unicorn Surgeon Dr. Jennifer Romano reflects on the differences between men and women in pediatric cardiothoracic surgery.

he phrase “as rare as a unicorn” can be used to describe Jennifer Romano’s career: she is a self-proclaimed “part time” pediatric heart surgeon. She is also the mother of two children: Maximillian, four, and Allegra, two. She has to choose between these jobs sometimes. During our interview, the usually fashionable Dr. Romano was wearing a mustard-stained shirt, proving that being a busy surgeon and a busy mother sometimes gets...well...busy. She is too busy for laundry sometimes, and in those times a mustard-stained shirt has to do. Besides getting stains on her clothing at home, she often gets stains on her clothing at work. Recently, for example, Romano was home on a Sunday morning playing with her kids when she was paged to the intensive care unit (ICU) to help a patient who was bleeding into his chest. She rushed to the hospital, and without hesitation opened his chest and found that his aorta was torn open; while blood squirted up at her, getting all over her surgical gown, she sutured his aorta and saved his life. Just like at home, she got a bit messy doing what she loves. Romano, M.D., Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgeon at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital (Mott), didn’t plan to be a surgeon at first. She originally wanted to go to vet school, but when asking a professor for a recommendation letter, she was told that unless she applied to medical school as well as vet school, she wouldn’t get her letter from him. So, she took the MCAT and applied to various med schools. She ended up getting into Harvard Medical School and spent the next four years of her life there. After med school, Romano looked for

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residency programs that were inclusive of women. The University of Michigan was one of them. “When I came to Michigan, they had already had a strong tradition of training women,” Romano said. “When I was interviewing, there were many surgery programs that had never trained a woman and were actually very proud of that.” One of these places was Columbia University. When Romano walked into the room, she found she was the only woman interviewing that year. There were 19 men in dark black suits, in contrast to her grey and lavender pantsuit. “One of the attendings nudged another one and said, ‘Hey look, there’s a chick this year,’” Romano said. She was shocked that her being there was new for them. During one of the interviews, she was asked questions that she had not anticipated: “So what are you gonna do if you start crying in the operating room? Do you think women can really be heart surgeons? Do you think that’s the right place for women?” Her first thought during that interview was that she was being challenged. “Then I BELOW: Romano poses with her husband, Matthew, and their two children, Maximillian and Allegra. Romano values spending a lot of time with her family, and she sacrifices a couple surgeries every week to do so. RIGHT: Romano gets a little messy as she saves a patient’s life. When she opened his chest, blood squirted up at her from his aorta, covering her surgical gown and mask. PHOTO COURTESY OF JENNIFER ROMANO

realized that no, he really thinks that,” she recalled. “I…I was just speechless. I opted not to train in a place like that. I self-selected to be in a program where that kind of mentality was not there. Certainly when I chose to go into surgery, I never wanted to be the person who broke the glass ceiling, but somehow or another by choosing to be a pediatric heart surgeon, I found myself pinned up against the glass ceiling.” During her intern year at Michigan there were six chief residents, two of them women. The female chiefs were known as the top residents by both attendings and trainees. “It wasn’t like I had to pave the way,” Romano said. “They were already used to having women that were amazing.” Because of these strong women, Romano had great mentorship and support throughout her residency. Romano is a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, meaning she operates on the hearts of children. She describes herself as working “part time” because on average she only does six surgeries a week despite doing many other tasks: she sees patients in clinic; participates in conference calls; attends

team meetings; works on research projects; is a member of multiple committees; and travels to various places around the world. “The nice thing is that my job has a lot of different facets,” Romano said. “I’d have a hard time if I had to be sitting at a desk or focused on one extended task for a long period of time. I have a lot of variability, active things.” Common stereotypes have portrayed women as wanting to do jobs with only necessary basic skills. This is a stereotype that Romano has clearly proven wrong. Another common stereotype is that women can’t handle hard tasks or jobs. “The type of surgery I do is fairly intense,” Romano said. “Three-to-four-hours-long surgeries are common. That’s where I probably get the most satisfaction: When you have a good repair, the patient is fixed; you can tell the family, ‘You’re done, they’re fine, you can just grow them, love them, and send me holiday photos.’” It’s often presumed that a woman in the medical field has to work harder to prove they are just as good as men. Romano doesn’t agree. “Being a woman, if anything, worked to my advantage,” she said. As a woman, she’s felt supported, whether because of her personality, luck, or just how she feels a senior male generally sees a junior female. “As weird as it is to say, I think it was easier for a senior male to look at a junior female trainee in more of a paternalistic, protective, nurturing way,” Romano said. By contrast, she has noticed that the relationship between senior male surgeons and junior male surgeons is more like a pushy father and his son. She points out that being a woman set her apart off the bat from all the men. “I think that it worked to my advantage because it was very easy to stand out,” Romano said. “If there’s 60 guys and one woman, it was very easy for people to remember who I was, for better or for worse, probably. People got to know my name faster and better on the national scene because I wasn’t ‘just another guy.’” They also remembered her because of her skill in the operating room. One surgeon who trained with Dr. Romano said that she is considered by many to be the best techncial surgeon to come from the University of Michigan training program in the last 20+ years. Romano feels that another advantage to being a woman in her field is that it seems a lot of families gravitate towards a female surgeon. It may be easier for a mother of a kid with a broken heart to trust another mother with their child. She’s also very cognizant of scars, and it’s often said by former patients that she focuses on operating to minimize major scarring. “They seek me out for that because I get the fact that [for example] a prom dress is important,” Romano said. “There are a few dresses in your life that are important, and if I can make it so you can wear a strapless dress, so be it.”

A big difference between being a man versus being a woman in the workforce is salary. Romano was hired for approximately 10 percent less than her male equivalents, and she continues to get paid less. “The problem is, if you start off lower, even if you’re getting the same percentage raises, you never catch up,” she said. She can easily compare herself to a male residency classmate: one who received a higher salary and academic rank. “We did all the same training, and I had an additional year of training, two additional board certifications, just as many publications, and he still got paid more than me,” Romano said. “He came in as an assistant professor and I came in as a lecturer.” Romano is now an assistant professor as well, but she had to work her way up to that position. She doesn’t think that this example of treating a woman differently is a conscious decision for everyone. “I think it’s just unfortunately pervasive,” Romano said. “I don’t think people think, ‘Oh, she’s a woman, I’m gonna pay her less.’ It’s more like, ‘Oh, she’s a woman, let’s give her this salary.’ And it’s so subconscious.” She notes that women are usually slower to get promoted, slower to move up the track, and slower to get nominated for things. She does point out that she’s been fortunate enough to have good mentorship and support, but as a whole she believes this is a clear disadvantage to being a woman. When looking at her female counterparts, many haven’t been as fortunate to have similar mentorship to hers, and their careers are at very different places than hers despite being the same number of years out from training. There are approximately 200 pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons in the United States; of those 200, only eight are women, and only two are members of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS); Romano is the only one that is on the American Board for Thoracic Surgery. There are more adult cardiothoracic surgeons than pediatric — and more women — but if you look at the ratio of women to men for adult cardiothoracic surgeons, it’s even smaller than for pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons. So although not quite “as rare as a unicorn,” it is pretty rare. Another clear difference between female and male surgeons is often their family. “Even though I have partners that are like, ‘Oh, we’re very involved with our kids, we totally get it,’ no, you don’t get it,” Romano said. “You don’t get the feeling of being a mom, that by six o’clock at night, I need to be the one at home, I need to get home, I need to see my kids.” She uses her husband, an adult cardiothoracic surgeon, as a great example of this. There’s no question he loves his children, but at the end of the day he wants to get everything finished up at the hospital before going home. For Romano, on days when

‘‘

Certainly when I chose to go into surgery, I never wanted to be the person who broke the glass ceiling, but somehow or another by choosing to be a pediatric heart surgeon, I found myself pinned up against the glass ceiling.

she’s not operating, she makes sure she leaves at six so she can go home and be with her children, moving work to second place. Her husband is very supportive of what she does and the choices she makes. This is important to Romano given the high value she places on family and relationships in addition to work life. “I think usually men inherently are not necessarily attracted to women that have a similarly competitive or even more competitive profession than them, so that’s difficult,” Romano said. She married her husband when she was 40 and had her children when she was 42 and 44; she and her husband were already attending surgeons. While she loves her family and the course her life has taken, these were not her ideal ages to start a family, but everyone has to make compromises and sacrifices at some point. One piece of advice she gives female residents is about “having it all.” “You can have it all in terms of what is ‘all’ for you,” Romano said. “But I think the external world’s view of having it all — the big career, the big family — that’s somebody else putting that on you.” At this point in her career, it’s more important to her to take her kids to their swim lessons than to get those extra papers published. That’s her balance. To others, this balance may be different. Romano believes that “having it all” in terms of each person’s individual balance is one of the biggest challenges for women in the medical field. This balance is often different for different people, just as it can become different throughout one woman’s career. In the beginning of a surgical career, there’s a lot of schooling and training, so starting a family is not the main focus for many women; later in their life, though, they may want a family. “In all honesty and sincerity, I do tell

November 2017

women, if you’re thinking about pursuing a career in surgery, freeze your eggs,” Romano said. In 2014, the average age of first-time mothers was 26.3 years. When starting your residency, Romano stresses that you don’t know where life is going to take you; you aren’t going to be 26 again. “At this point in time, if you’ve invested $250,000 plus in your education, what’s investing $20,000 in your family, or future family?” Romano said. She tells people to “really follow your heart and what you want to do.” Anyone, but especially doctors, need to really think about what they truly value in life. This could be where they want to live, what they want to do, or whether or not they want to have a family. “These things are important,” Ro-

mano said. “Embrace those values because your personal values for what you view for your life are just as important as your professional values. And I think that can very easily get lost during training.” Finally, though difficult to talk about, there are some things that unfortunately come with being a woman in a “man’s world” that are criminal: sexual misconduct and objectification. Sadly, this has happened to Romano. When she was in college, she was part of a sexual misconduct suit. She actually didn’t speak up at first because “that’s a very awkward position to be in,” Romano said. “Especially when you’re not sure what the ramifications of speaking out are going to be.” Luckily for her, it wasn’t overly physical, mostly just sexualized, derogatory comments. However, such situations can be

very damaging for women following a path like Dr. Romano. Though the world of medicine can be difficult for many women, Michigan has set a great example for their inclusion not just as participants, but as leaders, especially the male-dominated departments. “When you look at the University of Michigan, there’s a lot of women: there’s a woman who’s the first ever female chairman of neurosurgery, and [another who’s the] first ever female chairman of head/neck surgery,” Romano said. “They’re out there.” We are lucky to have a uniquely talented female like Dr. Romano performing pediatric cardiothoracic surgery right here in Ann Arbor. The female surgeons and leaders of the future couldn’t find a better role model.

College

Medical School

Surgical Residency

Fellowship

4 years

7 years

3 years

Helicopter Parents: Spinning Out of Control For overprotective parents, controling their child’s life may mean sacrificing mental health entering adolesence.

A pedicatric cardiothoracic surgeon will spend on average 18 years in school or training after high school. The breakdown in years is above.

On average, female surgeons receive

8 in 200

Only 4% of pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons are women. 40

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8% less pay than their male equivalents.

BY AVA MILLMAN

tepping through the doors of high school for the first time can be a transformative experience; the shift from middle schooler to freshman can be terrifying, exhilarating, or straight nauseating. This transitional moment is something that Pioneer’s A.P. Psychology teacher Jodi Bullinger has noticed countless times. However, the start of the 2017-2018 school year was different. While students still took that same nervous step, their parents followed close behind: holding their books, walking them to their lockers, and showing them to their first class. The epidemic of ‘Helicopter Parenting’ is on the rise, and Bullinger is concerned that there is no turning back. Helicopter parenting is a style of raising a child in which an overprotective parent

discourages thier child’s independence by being too involved in that child’s life. “Turning this trend around is like trying to back up a very heavy, fast-moving ship: you have to work at really slowing it down,” Bullinger said. “Then when you hit that reverse throttle that initial nudge takes a lot of energy until you can get things moving in the opposite direction, and you get some success. It would be a very multifaceted project: parents, students, psychologists, social workers, community leaders, all taking their place in the conversation. This much involvement is simply unrealistic.” The overarching goal behind helicopter parenting is to help your child be successful at all costs. However, this constant parent intervention deprives adolescents of the tools needed to handle adversity and

complicated social situations. Because these children have not discovered how to fend for themselves they resort to extreme methods of coping with stress. “If you don’t begin building a problem-solving skill set early, it is one of the factors that leads to things like cutting,” Bullinger said. “These kids have a maladaptive way of trying to figure out how to have a discomfort or a pain that they can control because they can’t control the other stuff.” Adolescent self harm is just the one of the negative effects that helicopter parenting can have on a child’s mental health. The increased amount of parental pressure along with a lack of social skills causes kids to snap when they get a taste of the real world. “Clinical depression is generally a combination of both biological and environmental factors,” Bullinger said. “We are seeing rates skyrocket in this generation, and anxiety is catching up to depression. I am seeing things at work I have never seen before; panic attacks so bad kids are leaving class, walking into mine, and hiding under tables completely incapacitated in the middle of school.” In the most extreme cases Bullinger has witnessed catatonia, where a student is completely unresponsive to outside stimulation. They are stuck staring off into space, unable to move or react to anything. This symptom is so severe that it is often manifested with schizophrenia. “To see catatonia clinically is one thing; to see it happen in the middle of a school setting is another,” Bullinger said. Not only does the anxiety and depression that students are being diagnosed follow them to high school will it will be with them for the rest of their lives. It is inevitable that eventually a child is going to have to move away from home, and begin their own life. By hovering over kids during their adolescence, and never giving them an opportunity to learn from their mistakes, they become reliant on their parents through adulthood too. “I know professors at the graduate school level that have had parents call them to debate grades,” Bullinger said. “I even have friends in Corporate America whose parents are contacting their bosses.” “What helicopter parenting says to the kid is, ‘you don’t think I can handle it,’” Bullinger said. “If your parents don’t believe in you how are you supposed to believe in yourself.”

November 2017

“The Women are Watching campaign strives to identify and combat misogyny within the youth of Ann Arbor. Sexism is often recognized, but left unaddressed. The W.A.W. campaign encourages not only women, but everyone, to step up and say something when they come across misogyny in their daily lives. Through education, intentional intersectionality, and empowerment, we can change the way young women view themselves and are perceived within the Ann Arbor community.”

On Women’s Rights By Suephie Saam

Women Are Watching Two teenage girls leave their comfort zone behind for a change in their community.

“

I think you’re just misinterpreting it.” These words were uttered out of a teenage boy’s mouth just moments before Sophia Gibson spoke up. Gibson felt her hands clamp up and stomach tighten as she found herself standing alone in an environment seemingly sculpted for male dominance. Gibson’s English 11 teacher had just made the claim that catcalling is not anything about gender, but about men just being honest about how they feel. Shocked and disgusted by this comment, Gibson found herself disappointed as she took a slight look around the room, only to notice that the vast number of females had remained mute. Growing up with generalized anxiety disorder had always been a barrier in Gibson’s life. She found that in most social situations, it was hard for her to find the comfort to speak up. It was in that moment that Gibson found her courage and learned how to stick up for herself. “Women can’t just tolerate being put in these situations anymore,” Gibson said. “It’s suffocating us.” Gibson described her experience in this classroom as her “personal hell.” She explained she believes everything happens for a reason. This incident not only gave her the opportunity to capture her strength, it sparked Gibson’s ideal project: Women Are Watching. Women Are Watching is an organization with the mission to empower young women in Ann Arbor to speak up when faced with misogyny. The foundation encourages young women and men to take the pledge: “When I experience sexism, I will address it in order to change the conversation. When I see another person in a situation involving gender bias, I will speak up on their behalf. My response will be intersectional and sensitive to the circumstances.” Gibson met her co-founder Madeline Small at the Michigan Peer-to-Peer campaign, an event which aims to combat men-

tal illness in high schools. Small was presenting Skyline High School’s Peer-to-Peer program website, which quickly caught Gibson’s eye. Although Gibson is a member of Huron High School’s Peer-to-Peer program, she felt as though her school’s administration was too strict to support such an organization. Gibson then set her mind on introducing the foundation through a website. Knowing Small was a female activist and had experience with creating websites, she contacted her and asked for her to join on as co-founder. When their website first launched, Gibson and Small both posted blogs sharing some of their personal experiences. Small’s narrative spoke on her battle with catcalling, and Gibson’s spoke of her journey with mental illness. Though these topics do not necessarily target feminism, Gibson and Small ensured their belief and goal to keep the foundation intersectional: meaning that the foundation not only supports the ideals of feminism, but wants to tackle all areas woman may struggle in. Though Gibson wasn’t sure how her blog would be perceived, she is grateful to have found the courage to share her story. Last year, Gibson had one realization: mental illness itself is crushing, but for her, the stigma surrounding mental illness was the most heartbreaking. Now, Gibson calls herself an advocate for mental illness. She shares her story often, speaking at local events around Ann Arbor. Gibson described the importance of staying close to her narrative. “I just wanted to record what I felt in that moment because I don’t know how I’ll feel ten years from now,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I honored that moment and remember that.” As the new school year was approaching, Gibson and Small decided they wanted to create more outreach for females in high school, especially for the incoming fresh-

man. They sent out an application, looking for high school representatives around Ann Arbor. Gibson explained that the representatives who were chosen have a strong passion to make an impact in the community. “We wanted to make sure that freshmen girls know [high school] is a supportive place for women, and that they know [our representatives] are people who are supportive of them,” Gibson said. The high school representatives are now working on their own blogs, which will be posted on the Women Are Watching website. The website also consists of “profiles.” This part of the website focuses on featuring local activists around Ann Arbor. Currently, Gibson and Small have interviewed two individuals. Small interviewed Anuja Rajendra, a candidate for Michigan State Senate 18th district; Gibson interviewed Lit Kurtz, a local newspaper vendor, writer and advocate for the homeless. Before meeting Kurtz, Gibson was a huge fan of her articles in Groundcover, a local street newspaper designed to provide income for the homeless. For Gibson, speaking with Kurtz was one of the most enlightening experiences so far with the organization. Gibson explained that a lot of businesses have agreed to put their posters in their windows, which is allowing Women are Watching to become a more recognized symbol. Her biggest hope for the foundation is that it becomes more of a household name, and raises the bar for everyone in the community. Gibson explained the intimidation men may face when women speak up. She encourages young women to stand up for themselves when faced with misogyny. “Just take up space, say that you’re here, you don’t like what they’re saying, and that you’re going to say something about it.”

WOMEN ARE WATCHING

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| LEFT GRAPHIC BY GRACE JENSEN FAR LEFT GRAPHIC BY CATHERINE SMALL

November 2017

On Student Activism by Loey Jones-Perpich

On Local Activism By Claire Middleton and Bella Yerkes Kyndall Flowers stands outside of the Ann Arbor Blake Transit Center with fellow protesters.They marched against police brutality in Ann Arbor. PHOTO COURTESY OF KYNDALL FLOWERS

The Next Generation of Activism In an age filled with social justice movements and changing opinions, student activists have become drastically important. Three Ann Arbor teen activists, Isha Verma, Madeline Small, and Clarence Collins III, along with many others, are fighting for social justice. Each has their own personal goals and motivations that push them along their path towards change. “My goal is to make everybody to feel safe, and everybody to love themselves, and for me to educate them more and to make people morally good,” Verma said. A young Indian woman, Verma is particularly active at the Neutral Zone, a youth-driven center in Ann Arbor that works to diversify the community and create personal growth. She has hosted Diversity Day and worked at the event to educate people about gender identity and sexuality. Verma has experienced racism throughout her life through teasing, bullying, and even through stories told to her by her mother. Even though she is still recovering from the harsh impact racism has had on her, she is motivated by the hope that no people will have to feel the fear and hurt that she has felt. “I would love to start a movement, especially for women of color who come from Indian descent, because you don’t see that a lot, especially in the modern sense of view,” Verma said. While Verma speaks out for self love and racial diversity, Madeline Small is inspired by feminism. Small is a senior at Skyline High School. She considers herself an activist, trying to raise awareness for women’s health. Using coupons and money from bake sales, her club, Social Awareness Club, supplies free tampons and pads in all of the girls’ restrooms at Skyline to help girls save money. Small and her friend Sophia Gibson started an organization, Women are Watching, to help combat internalized misogyny in the Ann Arbor community. The organization focuses on women, but gives anyone who is a feminist a platform to stay informed and to reflect positively within themselves. “[You don’t] have to compromise your own well being,” Small said. “You can see what’s happening in the news and then 44

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manifest that into an idea.” Role models can be incredibly inspirational to young people. Small has two: her grandmother, who protested for women’s rights in the 1960s and ‘70s, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice. “She says what she wants, apologizes later, and I love that,” Small said. “She’s in such a high position of power and she’s speaking out against it — she’s always been outside of the norm when it comes to liberal values in the Supreme Court, so I just love that right now she is currently in a conservative majority Supreme Court and she just doesn’t care. She’s still doing what she wants, regardless of whether or not her superiors are going to like it.” For Verma, many people stand out as role models. She looks up to Ebere, a woman who leads the Students Educating Each other about Diversity program at the Neutral Zone, for being a strong black woman who is proud of who she is. Other role models for Verma are acquaintances and friends. “They’re proud of who they are,” Verma said, “or they’re developing it and they talk about it — those are people who inspire me and who are my role models and I would like to be like them one day.” As a man of color, Clarence Collins III feels motivated to spark change and therefore participates in many public demonstrations, with the goal of being able to live a good life along with family and other people in the world. His junior year, he gave a speech at the opening day ceremony at Community High. After seeing names like Philando Castile and Alton Sterling used in hashtags on social media, he participated in rallies and protests, but noticed something about the crowd. “I saw none of those people that were hashtagging [at those demonstrations],” Collins said. “I’m seeing you preaching [on social media], but you’re not really doing it. My takeaway from that was, I have to tell people. I just want to make sure that everybody knows that they need to do things and not just talk about things, because that’s kind of plaguing a lot of social change, because everybody wants to talk and nobody

wants to do.” While Collins has participated in and continues to participate in many Black Lives Matter protests, he also engages in movements in support of other oppressed groups of people, such as people who are facing deportation. “I see [those people], and I don’t want them to feel like I’m not supporting them, because I know how it feels to not be supported,” Collins said. “That’s why I do more than BLM protests, because obviously if you’re standing for one thing, you can’t just stand for the one thing. I care enough to go, I care enough to talk about it, I care enough to enact the change, and I feel like everybody should care.” As the people growing up around changing minds and activism, the teens and young adults of the world are becoming increasingly relied on to enact change. “New people equals new ideas,” Small said. “Newer people are living through changes that older generations aren’t used to. Trends are showing that people who grow up with new ideas stick with them.” “I think activism is a very cyclical thing,” Collins said, “because it’s the young people that always have to enact it. It’s always going to be the young people that have to — it’s an obligation. I’m not even going to say [that we should], that’s an obligation. As young people, we have to be the ones who change it, because we’re going to be the ones who are running it, sooner or later.” Especially for teens, organizations are crucial to involvement in activism. Verma recommends finding an organization, such as the Neutral Zone, that can help in figuring out what it is that you are passionate to change. Small advises all young people getting involved in activism to stop taking other people’s opinions into account. “The struggle with being a teenager is that a lot of people don’t take you seriously, especially when you’re involved in politics and activism,” Small said. “So in short, I would just say [to] just stop caring.” She reminds young people that there is always going to be someone who doesn’t agree with you, and it’s important to put that aside and keep moving forward.

Flowers on the World Kyndall Flowers and her most recent endeavours: writing her own book and invlovment in local activism. BY CLAIRE MIDDLETON AND BELLA YERKES

wallowed up in big leather couches with peach cobbler and TV playing in the background, eight-year-old Kyndall Flowers felt safe. She was at her neighbor Shawn Craig’s house, where music or TV was always playing and food was always served. Craig taught Flowers how to bake and fry chicken. He lived across the street from Flowers in New Jersey. Flowers would run into Craig’s house and would spend endless hours at “Auntie Shawnies.” “Her Christmas dinners were iconic because everyone would come and we would be left [with] leftovers for months. You wouldn’t have to cook at all,” Flowers said. She attended a school that was a majority minority school. There were step-teams and school spirit. Then, she was uprooted to Michigan. Moving to Ann Arbor was more than difficult for Flowers. She was dropped in the middle of the Midwest. In New Jersey, she was constantly surrounded by powerful black women, had children’s books starring black characters, and black neighbors.

A town commonly referred to as a bubble with promises of diversity was not that simple to Flowers. “It’s not as diverse as Ann Arbor would like itself to be,” according to Flowers. Flowers has been involved in local activism relating to racist incidents in Ann Arbor. “I think to call Ann Arbor a bubble is to deny the racism that happens here as something that is important and worth being upset over,” Flowers said. She has been working against racist incidents that have occurred on the University of Michigan’s campus and the unjust beating of a black teen at the Ann Arbor Transit Center. Flowers originally planned to go and teach English overseas during her gap year. She and her family decided it would be safer for Flowers to stay domestic. “I’ve been learning a lot about the power of staying home,” Flowers said. “I’ve been kind of forced to learn about staying home and working within your own community, because while I could go overseas and help

things out there, there’s still black men getting beat up at the bus stop like down the street from me. So there always needs to be someone there to do the work.” Next year, Flowers will attend Howard University in Washington D.C. She picked Howard for the writers they have produced and because it is a historically black college. As for the next year, Flowers has been applying for poetry fellowships, writing for Current Magazine, hosting open mics for Sweetwaters, working on curating Poetry Night in Ann Arbor, and writing her first book of poetry When Flowers first started writing poetry during her sophomore year of high school, her poems predominantly focused on her race and her experience as a black woman. Lately, she has been focusing on mental health and generational wealth. She has also been exploring less serious poetry, writing poems based off tweets and songs. Flowers will continue to write and stay active in Ann Arbor before she attends Howard next fall.

November 2017

On Music By Wm. Henry Schirmer Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/theleftlanes Instagram: @leftlanes

Creating Their Sound

‘‘

A local student-run band talks about their journey through the world of music.

Left Lanes The

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Five Ann Arbor Public School students, three from Community High School (CHS) and two from Skyline High School (SHS), gathered in a house off of Dexter Ann Arbor Rd; the whole building echoed with music coming from a dimly lit basement. Posters of various musicians, including The Who and Led Zeppelin, hung on the walls. The floor was strung with cords. This was a typical meeting of The Left Lanes, a local student-run band. “The end of the school year is when these people were all together,” said Isaac McKenna, one of the guitarists of the band. This was not McKenna’s first band. Around April, McKenna and Max Mellor, the other guitarist, began forming a band. However, this group of people didn’t last. “They weren’t bad,” McKenna said. “They just weren’t right for our band.” Noah Hogan, the bassist, was the first to join McKenna and Mellor, having previously known them from the CHS jazz program. Following Hogan, the group invited Natalie Maxey, the vocalist, after hearing her sing through Snapchat. “Then I got Gabe [Wood] somehow,” Mellor said. “I just met Gabe at a park. It was wild.” By the end of June 2017, the whole group was together and already working on pieces. The first song The Left Lanes wrote as a group was “I Got It,” which was completed within the first few meetings. “I didn’t really know what to expect [in terms of] how it would sound with a band, and it sounded better than I ever could imagine,” McKenna said. “It was a pretty amazing feeling.” “I Got It” was also a great starting point for the band. The band has written seven songs in addition to various beginnings of new songs. “We always have several different riffs and chords going that we haven’t written songs for yet,” McKenna said. This is how most of their songs begin. “It starts when Issac and I are bored in jazz and we write some chords, and we’re like, ‘These chords sound good and I like these chords,’” Mellor said. “Then we show [the band] and Noah adds some bass. We just jam on it for while and Gabe gives us some drums. Then Natalie, I mean I don’t know how [she] writes, [she’s] crazy.” While the song is being constructed, Maxey is busy writing her lyrics. “I try take in everything that they are doing and the sense of colors,” Maxey said. “I

have synesthesia.” Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense involuntarily stimulates another. For Maxey, the sounds produced by the band form colors. “I kind of listen to [the colors] and see how they work together and see what texture they have,” Maxey said. “I compare that to all the music I know, and the lyrics I have, and try to match lyrics with color.” From these ‘jams’, they begin to figure out the song structure. “Our song structure isn’t always the normal intro-versechorus-verse-chorus-bridge,” McKenna said. “We don’t usually do normal.” The group described their writing process as “weird, but functional.” In addition to this, they write their songs “stupidly fast,” as Mellor describes it. “I remember I had to leave and when I got home they were like ‘Oh, we wrote a new song while you were gone.’” This song was “Colors.” “Colors” was the first song The Left Lanes shared with the public using Soundcloud. “We definitely needed some publicity, and [Colors] helped people to realize who we are,” McKenna said. “Otherwise, no one hears our music and it just stays in our basement.” Getting a song out there was a necessary step they needed to take in order to get gigs. A day after the song was posted, it had accumulated around 2,000 plays. “I didn’t expect to get that many views,” McKenna said. “I think especially people in Ann Arbor have listened to it a bunch of times. It definitely feels good.” The ambitions of the group now is to play a show. “It’s something that we want to do,” McKenna said. “We just haven’t had time.” McKenna, Mellor, and Hogan have played shows in the past, but not with this group. Maxey, who sang in choir, and Wood have never played publicly outside of school. “I like playing live, so I’m excited to do that,” Hogan said. “Live shows is what I want to do.” The band also wishes to grow their fanbase. “I just want to be big enough so that people know who we are and if you say, ‘Oh The Left Lanes’ people will recognize us,” McKenna said. This band has become an important part in each of the members’ lives. “It’s really cool for me because I’ve wanted to be in a band for a such a long time but I haven’t really had anyone,” Wood said.

It’s just a fun thing to do. It’s serious in a way that we write music, but we just have so much fun doing it.

“Writing music all the time is super cool.” This is Wood’s first time being part of a band. “It’s just a fun thing to do,” Mellor said. “It’s serious in a way that we write music, but we just have so much fun doing it.” They believe creating their own music is a major part of why they enjoy this process. “If we were a cover band I don’t think it would be the same,” McKenna said. “I think that creating art is a cool thing to do.” In addition to creating art, the connection between the members is a valued aspect. “Every time I come in here I just feel so connected listening to music and listening to all the colors,” Maxey said. “It’s just great, and I’m glad to be in a group where I feel so connected.” The future of the band isn’t set, but the goal “is to get good enough that Gabe can take a gap year,” Mellor said, Wood being a year older than the rest of the members. “I only want to take a gap year if we have to,” Wood said. “That’s what I’m saying,” Mellor said. “If we get good enough to where you want to stay, that’s the prime.”

The Left Lanes will be performing at the B-side on Nov. 10 at 7 p.m.. This is a relief fundraiser for Hurricanes Harvery and Irma. It’s $5 at the door and additional donations are accepted.

November 2017

Growing Up A Little Bit Faster The diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes requires a teenager to quickly learn responsibility. BY GRACE JENSEN

The Communicator Magazine

BELOW: Seibler examines her pricked finger before testing her blood sugar. It is recommended that people wiith diabetes do this several times a day.

t 13 years old, Kiara Siebler knew something was wrong. She was 5’3”, and weighed 70 pounds, and couldn’t gain weight no matter how much she ate. She was constantly thirsty and had to pee. And she was always tired. In early 2014, sitting at her kitchen table with a laptop, Siebler typed her symptoms into Web MD, an online medical site. The results came in: diabetes. Siebler told her parents and three sisters, who laughed. They were skeptical, but her symptoms persisted. Siebler was admitted to the E.R. a few months later on Monday, March 19. Her mom had taken her to the doctor, who was fairly sure that her online diagnosis had been correct. She was given injections directly into her veins. She dreaded watching the needles sink into her skin, but at that point Siebler did not know a lot about what diabetes meant for her future. “It was a lot to take in at one time,” she said. “They were teaching me all this different stuff at the same time, and I didn’t really know what was going on. I didn’t really process that it was actually happening, because when I was at the hospital, it wasn’t part of my real life. It was a whole separate thing. It didn’t feel real until I got home.” She was held in the hospital until that Thursday evening. Siebler has type 1 diabetes, which means her body’s immune system attacks the beta cells in her pancreas. These cells normally produce insulin, a hormone that allows the body to use glucose from carbohydrates to make and store energy. Without it, her blood sugar level is unstable, causing the symptoms that Siebler experienced before diagnosis. Type 1, unlike type 2, is genetic and unpreventable. To take care of herself, Siebler must inject insulin into her bloodstream using a syringe or insulin pen every time she eats as well as frequently check her blood sugar by pricking her finger onto a test strip. “A lot of times you don’t realize, when you go out with your friends, you don’t take stuff with you, but then with diabetes you always have to have a bag,” she said. In airports, Siebler has to explain the metal in her luggage to security, every time. At concerts and events where bags aren’t allowed, she has to find a way to bring in her supplies. “It’s annoying, but… it could be worse,” she said. Siebler has faced her share of stereotyping with diabetes. She says that when people think of someone with diabetes, they are more likely to think of an older overweight person than a skinny, otherwise healthy, athletic teenage girl. “I’ll be in class, and you know when peo-

ple bring snacks to class and then someone eats longer, [they’re] like, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to get diabetes!’ and like I sit there and I’m like... ‘Oh.’ ‘Cause people use it as an insult, and nobody knows, it’s not like they’re trying to be mean, but it’s like…” she shrugged. To let people know, she has to figure out the right time and place to tell new friends about her condition. “It’s weird, because when you first interact with someone you’re not going to be like, ‘Hi, I’m Kiara and I have diabetes,’” she said. “So you kind of wait until you’re close enough with them that they should know, but then it’s also weird because you get close to someone without them knowing and then being like, ‘Oh, there’s this whole other part of me that you don’t even know about.’” Because Siebler developed diabetes when she was young, she doesn’t know exactly how it has impacted her teenage years. “I guess I’ll never know,” she said. “But I feel like I had to grow up a little bit faster. My parents didn’t really help me with it a lot so I had to like be completely responsible for myself. Which I think took maturity, or whatever.” “People forget a lot, because I do it all on my own, and so people don’t really remember that I have to actually do stuff to take care of myself,” she said. “They don’t really ever have to do anything; it doesn’t really affect them at all.” She has known of other people who have diabetes—her parents’ friends, one of her sister’s friends—but has never been able to talk in depth with someone else who has it. She tries not to let her diabetes bother her. “I’ve kind of accepted it,” she said. “At this point it’s just kind of part of my life now.” Siebler went back to the hospital in October of 2016. She got sick, which put her at risk for a high level of ketones, fatty acids in the bloodstream which mean the body has resorted to burning body fat for energy because it is unable to use glucose. She developed ketoacidosis, a dangerous complication from too many ketones. She could not breathe and kept throwing up, so she was taken to the E.R. Her sister Geena carried her to and from the car and helped her in the bathroom, because she was too weak to do it herself. When she got to her hospital room, she passed out on the bed. She stayed in the hospital for three days. She has not been back since. Despite the gravity of the situation, Siebler says she wasn’t too scared, and retains a positive outlook. “I feel like for me, I always expect that everything’s going to work out in the end, no matter what,” she said.

November 2017

Family Matters: A Story of Love, New York City, and Birds BY ELENA BERNIER

ina Bernier and her mother, Victoria Vaitiekaitis, sat across from each other in a diner in New Hampshire eating pea soup. Victoria enjoyed having her dark-haired, blueeyed daughter along. They would drive up from New York City, which took about four hours, and stay in a Holiday Inn. Once they finished their soup, they would pick up pistachio ice cream, her father’s favorite. Bernier, who was only five years old at the time, recalls the boredom that would ensue as she sat in the waiting room of the Veterans Hospital with her coloring books. At first, Bernier’s father was so depressed about having multiple sclerosis that he didn’t want to see his only daughter. So, for the first year, she stayed there in that waiting room. But, after a year went by, Bernier started going up with her mother. “It was just sad, because he was obviously a very wonderful person, and I really loved him and he really loved me,” Bernier said. Her father could hardly talk and was completely paralyzed, except for his right arm. “As I got older, I became aware of how awful his existence was, because he was pretty much completely cognitively there but he couldn’t move, so he was kind of trapped in his own body.” Bernier and her father, with help from volunteers, would write each other letters throughout the years. However, Bernier still missed having him in her life. Bernier’s father died when she was 19, spending 16 years paralyzed. When Bernier remembers her father though, she likes to think of who he was before the hospitals. Bernier always speaks with pride about him. Ernest Albert Bernier Jr., born in New Hampshire, was a highly skilled pilot, who flew over the ‘hump’ of the Himalayas, to deliver supplies during World War II. Back in those days, the planes weren’t able to reach the altitude that was needed to fly above the Himalaya Mountains, so Ernest would have to weave between them. After the war, Ernest flew for commercial airlines. To this day, whenever Bernier gets on a plane, she thinks of her father. “Every time I fly, I invite him to fly with me,” Bernier said. However, the multiple sclerosis still took a toll on Bernier’s family. “It was hard, my mother was very sad,” Bernier said. “It was a very unusual situation and she worked a lot, she was an anesthesiologist and was often on call.” In addition, Victoria was also a survivor of World War II, having grown up in Lithuania. At first, Bernier described Victoria as the fun parent—the parent she would

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spend weekends and days off with. As Bernier grew up, they started to get into more and more conflicts. “People weren’t quite as aware of the effects of PTSD, this was during the 70s,” Bernier said. “[Our relationship] was pretty emotional. I always knew that it wasn’t easy for her. The conflicts we would get into took precedence over the background respect and appreciation that I generally had for her. But now I really appreciate what she did and what she lived through.” Still, Bernier describes her childhood in Queens, New York City with a sense of happiness and comfort. With her mother often gone, her grandmother, Olga, was the one who raised her. “She was very calm, very steady, very intelligent,” Bernier said. “She just thought that I was the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth.” Olga had survived both World Wars. She was born in Latvia and moved to Lithuania later on. “Because she was a World War II survivor, and she had been through a lot, I think that being able to help raise me was a real source of joy for her,” Bernier said. Bernier is also very thankful for having grown up in New York City. “It’s had a profound influence on how I view the world,” Bernier said. “I really enjoyed being in very multicultural environment, and Queens is one of the most diverse areas in the United States. It made me very comfortable to be among people of other cultures, it made me really value that and seek it out. I’m happy when I go back to New York City because of the interesting people that I’m surrounded by. I think the diversity of people makes the world much more interesting, and much more fun.” In the summers, they would escape the heat of the city to the Catskill mountains. Bernier valued those summers, having always been drawn to the outdoors. They would spend their time on the screened in porch, which served as the living room and dining room. When it rained, Bernier would go out and play in the puddles. This love for being in nature was what eventually drew Bernier to the University of Michigan. Bernier originally went to the University of Chicago, but one day, a friend told her that the University of Michigan had a class where you could walk around in the woods for five hours. Hearing this, Bernier packed up her things and moved to Ann Arbor to study Ecology and Evolution with a focus on birds. Bernier soon came to love Michigan. “Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes, and there’s so much natural beauty here, so you don’t have to travel very far

to be in a natural area,” Bernier said. “The Great Lakes ecosystem is the ecosystem in which I feel most at home.” Ann Arbor is also where Bernier met her husband, Hunter Van Valkenburgh. At that time, Van Valkenburgh was the local mechanic, as well as a student at the University. He had a VW van, which he bolted his toolboxes to the floor of. As it turned out, Bernier needed her car fixed. “I thought he was very interesting and nice, and I invited him in for a cup of tea,” Bernier said. “But I had a boyfriend at the time, and he had a girlfriend at the time, so we had our cup of tea and we just went on our merry way.” Then, five years later, they met again in a chemistry class. Fast forward another six years, and they were getting married in the backyard of the house they still live in today. It was a large wedding with 250 guests. “We had a lovely time, [there] was great music, it was a group effort, we made all of our own food,” Bernier said. “[Hunter’s] sisters made the cakes, one of our friends brewed all the beer, and it was beautiful. It was a wonderful party, that was a pretty good day.” Years later, Bernier and Van Valkenburgh were traveling in the Lofoten Islands, a remote area of Norway, with their two kids. They visited a Viking festival, where Bernier happened upon a group of Lithuanian folk singers, dressed in traditional Lithuanian linen. “I just thought this was just the most remarkable thing that in this remote corner in Norway, at a rather remote Viking festival there were people singing Lithuanian songs,” Bernier said. Bernier learned that anthropologists and archaeologists had determined that the Western coast of Lithuania was a place where Vikings often came to set up trade and even settlements. At that time, Victoria was 91 years old and in a nursing home in Ann Arbor. “I was thinking how it kind of made sense that maybe she had some Viking in her, because she was a very strong-willed, intelligent and sharp person,” Bernier said. The songs that the Lithuanians were singing were about returning from war. They were the songs people would sing for their loved ones. “I was thinking about her, and just communicating with her spirit,” Bernier said. The next day, Bernier found out that during the time that she was thinking of her mother, her mother was actually dying. “I like to think that all of these songs that were calling those warriors home were also calling her home, and calling her spirit home to Lithuania.”

November 2017

On Family By Isabel Espinosa

The Rest is History From Colombia to Chicago: Roberto Espinosa’s unexpected journey through life.

oberto Espinosa’s father passed away just before his 18th birthday. The doctors concluded that his father died because of high blood pressure, as medications were not as developed in their hometown of Cartagena, Colombia. But Espinosa has a different theory. “He died from being sad,” Espinosa said. “With the politics of Colombia, you lost your job many times [with] every time a new president and a new party came on. [It] was a tough time at home when it came to money; I really think that that killed my father.” Although losing his father was very hard for him, Espinosa believes that it helped shape him. “I was a wimp until my father died,” Espinosa said. “When my father died I guess I got angry at God and I got angry at everyone. I was angry at the world.” Reality hit him and he had to face the world. Espinosa had no money, so he navigated his first three years at the Medical University of Cartagena by borrowing books from his friends. Unlike in the United States, medical school in Columbia is six years. At the Medical University of Colombia, if you got the top grade you didn’t have to pay the entrance fee for the next year. Fortunately

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for Espinosa, he got the top grades for four years of school. “[It was] out of need because I don’t know if I could get the money to to pay the entrance fee,” Espinosa said. “It was as simple as that.” Espinosa still remembers patients that he worked with when he was in school. The most memorable for him was the first patient that died. “A patient died of a problem with his heart and I tried to revive that patient [with] whatever method we had at that time,” Espinosa said. “A nun pulled me away and I got angry at her. I insulted her with every bad word you [could] imagine. “But a professor came [over and] quizzed me. He said, ‘What are you supposed to do in this situation? A, did we do it? Yes. B, did we do it? Yes.’ And we went C, D, E, F, [and] G. And then he told me, ‘You are not going to save everyone. It’s as simple as that.’ I wasn’t ready, I was a very young man, I wasn’t used to that. So this professor told me ‘Go and apologize to that nun.’ I went right away and she told me ‘Shut up. I am proud of you. You show heart. You should care.’ It was a powerful experience.” Through that experience, Espinosa became more compassionate. Before he came to the United States, he applied for surgical

residencies at a few Universities but none of them answered him. Looking back, he understands why none of them called him back. In Colombia, he was an intern at a community hospital. Some of the doctors and surgeons told him that he had the tools to be good at surgery. This made him sure that if he applied somewhere in the United States, that they would beg him to work there. His high status at the community hospital meant nothing to Colleges in the United States. Espinosa eventually made it to the United States on Jan. 4, 1964, where he stayed with a cousin in Chicago, IL until he found another place to stay. At that time in Chicago, it was five below zero under a blizzard. Because he was in 90 degree weather the day before, all Espinosa had with him was a thin gabardine that was lent to him by a friend. Eight hours after he arrived in Chicago, Espinosa had a job. He worked as a house physician, visiting patients in their homes and writing physicals for them. This was the only job Espinosa could’ve gotten because his english was not very strong and he didn’t have the right practicing license. Three months later, Espinosa’s english had improved enough for him to get a job as a surgical assistant. This job was much more enjoyable for him because he was exposed to surgeons and surgical tools, which was something that fascinated him in Colombia. Eventually, Espinosa got a job as a pediatrician and had an office for 40 years. Just when he thought he was going to retire, another hospital called him for a job interview. They had a lot of patients that spoke spanish, and Espinosa believes that is one of the main reasons he was called. He had an interview and got the job on Sept. 7, 2001. Espinosa has been at that job for 16 years, working as a pediatrician with kids of all ages. His favorite part is just being with the children. “They humble me every day, they are truthful, they’re great,” Espinosa said. Espinosa did not plan to become a pediatrician, but he truly believes that it has been the best thing that has happened to him. “It has humbled me many many many times in my life,” Espinosa said. “[It is] something that I need. Still, at this age, I need it big time. It was not my choice, but what the Lord had for me and I took it. The rest is history.”

Professionalism & Twitter BY WM. HENRY SCHIRMER

Twitter has become a great platform for public speaking. Every second on average, 6,000 tweets are sent out. With the wide range of audiences the tweets reach, it’s important to maintain a professional look. Here are some important tips to remember when writing your masterpiece: RETWEET ANYTHING THAT INVOLVES YOU What is the best way to boost your self image? That’s easy: simply retweet anything that makes you look good. No matter if it’s a photo of you or even some object that relates to you in any way, you should retweet it. In addition to boosting your self image, it shows how much you care about other opinions, even if what you’re retweeting is something like Trump’s retweet of a GIF of someone getting hit with a golf ball. #HASHTAG Hashtags have become one of the greatest ways to communicate your feelings in a professional way. #professionalcommunication. It also helps when you make your hashtags as #simple as possible so people don’t always know exactly what you are talking about, such as #NoKo, which Trump uses instead of spelling out all of North Korea. Hashtags are also a great way to show that you support someone without having to do any work. #PRstrong. GO ON RANDOM RANTS Something happens in the world. Do you know what the best way to talk about it is? Rant to your followers; it solves everything. Instead of getting up and actually dealing with the issue, stay on your couch and complain to strangers; that will make you sound like a professional. When going on a rant, it is important that it lasts for more than just a few sentences and spans over the course of a few hours or even a day. It just keeps going and going, often times repeating the same thing, just worded slightly differently or using very long, very run-on-like sentences, and if you get really good, you retweet things that happen to involve the subject. This is your chance to get everything you want to say out there into the public; just keep going, it never truly ends.

GIVE YOUR FRIENDS AND ENEMIES NICKNAMES When addressing others, giving them nicknames shows your readers that you have a strong relationship with them. It helps if you make their names funny and interesting, similar to Trump addressing the leader of North Korea as “Little Rocket Man.” This nickname demonstrates Trump’s ability to look past their differences and have a professional conversation. It also can add some humor if you attack the person in the nickname, such as saying “Crooked Hillary,” because what’s more professional than degrading others with fun nicknames? FORGET TO USE SPELLCHECK We all remember that day when we woke up to the marvelous new word “covfefe.” Because “despite the constant negative press covfefe,” Donald Trump’s professionalism on Twitter never ceases to amaze us. Now, we may never know exactly what this word means, but it certainly helped to get his point across. When writing your masterpieces, coming up with brand new words helps to show your readers that you know what you are doing. CAPITALIZE RANDOM WORDS Capitalizing ENTIRE words to REALLY make them stand out is a GREAT idea. It gives the feeling that you are YELLING, which adds a LEVEL of power and control to YOUR words. What is really important about this is CHOOSING the right words. You want to capitalize the words leading up to the key points of the sentence, NOT the key points themselves. “We MUST honor and respect it.” As you can see, the MUST is a VERY essential part of this tweet.

In all seriousness, social media has become a major part of our lives. Over the years, programs have been developed that allow us to speak to a massive range of individuals, including Twitter, which was developed in March 2006 and released the following July. Today, Twitter has around 328 million monthly users; Instagram has 400 million and Facebook around 2 billion. The things that you put on these platforms can never be fully deleted, leaving behind a virtual footprint. A footprint that could follow you for the rest of our life. The things we put on these platforms build an image for ourselves. What that image represents is up to you.

November 2017

Unwelcomed, Unrecognized, Unjust. One woman’s vacation to visit her father becomes the start of a new life. BY SACHA VERLON AND SAM CIESIELSKI

n 1999, nine-year-old Marria Ibarra-Frayre traveled with her mother and brother from their home in Guadalajara, Mexico to Detroit to visit their father, who had moved to the United States four years before in search of a better job and a better life. Initially, they planned to stay for a month. That vacation has lasted 18 years. “It was difficult at first,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “I remember, I came in in 4th grade and didn’t speak a word of English. The only thing that my dad wrote down for me on a little piece of paper was how to ask for the bathroom in English.” Because Ibarra-Frayre’s family traveled to the United States through a time-limited travel visa, they were not legally permitted to stay in the United States. Nevertheless, her parents chose to stay in the United States knowing that the quality of life would be better than in Guadalajara. “My parents are the anomaly, I would say,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “They are very bold... Maybe they did it to protect my brother and myself but we are here...They are very much in this mindset of we should not live in fear and we should not limit ourselves in what we can and cannot do.” Until 2012, Ibarra-Frayre and her family were living in the United States as illegal aliens: individuals from a foreign country who are residing in another country without authorization from the government. In the United States, the only way you can apply for citizenship is to get sponsored from an immediate relative who is a U.S. citizen. This system favors sponsorship from a parent, spouse, or child. The problem was, most of Ibarra-Frayre’s family didn’t have relatives that fit that category. This meant that they had no way to obtain citizenship and legally live in the country. “So people talk about ‘Why didn’t you just apply? Why didn’t you get in line? Why wouldn’t you just become a citizen?’” Ibarra-Frayre said. “And I would love to do that, but that option literally does not exist. There isn’t an application that I can fill out.” The only person who was eligible to apply for citizenship in her family was her father, Jesus Ibarra-Frayre. Unfortunately, Jesus’s only relative who was a U.S. citizen was his brother. That meant that his application would take years being processed before he would recieve his citizenship. It has been 16 54

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Concentration of DACA immigrants

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years since Jesus applied for citizenship, and he still hasn’t obtained it. He will probably need to wait five more years. The reason behind this lies in the maximum number of applications the federal government reviews per year. Even if an immigrant were qualified to apply, their application would be put at the back of the long line of other people’s applications, some of which may have been in the system for decades. The Obama Administration lifted the hopes of many illegal immigrants on June 15, 2012, when Obama announced the implementation of a program called the Deferred Action for Child Removal, also known as DACA. DACA was designed to help unaccompanied minors immigrate legally. Immigrants under the age of 16 without any legal status who were present in the United States prior to the establishment of DACA are granted a two year renewable stay assuming they are enrolled as a student or are an active member of the workforce. During the time of DACA’s implementation, Ibarra-Frayre was 22 years old, living in Milwaukee working in a legal services agency. She was able to apply for a DACA permit after she proved that she did not have a criminal record and that she never returned to Mexico. “It actually makes me really sad that I need DACA in order to have just basic human rights, like the right to have an ID, the right to work, the right to move about freely,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “It is very upsetting; the more I think about the things that DACA affords, the angrier it makes me. How did we get to the point in the U.S. that we need to have people go through this to get basic human rights, like the right to not be afraid and the right to support their families?” In December of 2014, the Obama administration attempted to expand the DACA program by broadening the restrictions, making a larger variety of immigrants eligible for the program. The expansion was met with substantial backlash; 26 states sued the Southern District of Texas in the District Court in question of the constitutionality of DACA with the expansion and the Deferred Action for Parents of America program. While Trump was insistent on the repeal of DACA during his presidential campaign, the Trump Administration released a list on of their demands in a deal to replace

With DACA, I’m able to build a very independent life for myself that I wasn’t able to have before.

DACA on Oct. 8. The list includes rigorous border security increases, financial aid to the President’s border wall, and making it more difficult for unaccompanied minors to enter the country in the first place. “A lot of these people are in the military, they have jobs… I fully understand it,” said Trump during an interview with Sean Hannity on Oct. 11. “But if we’re going to do something, we have to get something in return. And what I want is tremendous border regulation. I want the wall.” The government stopped processing new DACA applications on Oct. 5, declaring that they are only renewing pre-existing permits. The Trump Administration has left the responsibility of ‘fixing’ DACA to the legislative branch, who has until March 5, 2018 to make a change before DACA recipients start losing their legal status. This leaves immigrants like Ibarra-Frayre and her family fearful of losing their established lives in America. “With DACA, I’m able to build a very independent life for myself that I wasn’t able to have before,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “I have

my own apartment, I have a full time job that I love, I can travel freely, I had plans of buying a home in the area. And now all of these things are up in the air.” Now, Congress is faced with passing an immigration bill that satisfies the needs and wants of both pro and anti-immigration politicians. Republican Senators Thom Tillis and James Lankford have proposed the SUCCEED Act (Solution for Udocumented Children through Careers Employment Education and Defending Our Nation Act), which provides illegal aliens a 15-year path to citizenship. It would also prevent DACA recipients from sponsoring family members. To be eligible, the applicant would have to have lived in the U.S. since June 15, 2012 and entered the country before the age of 16. This proposed bill does not solve the problem of the drawn-out process required to gain citizenship. Some are asking for a bill

that grants legal residency to immigrants and leads to a path of permanent residency. Liana Mulholland, an advocate for this Federal DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), is an activist for BAMN (The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary) who helps to organize protests and demonstrations in Detroit and surrounding areas. BAMN is a national organization with local chapters at university chapters. “Everybody on DACA needs to have a way to be a citizen and protected from deportation,” Mulholland said. “There needs to be a way that everybody that’s… the 11 million undocumented people in the United States to also get a way to citizenship.” To many immigrants, America is as much of a safe-haven as a land of opportunity. But because of America’s strict immigra-

tion laws, some are being sent back into a life of constant fear and distrust in their government, and creating stricter immigration laws would restrict immigrants from fleeing from that. “[In America] there is no one coming to your house at the middle of the night and killing your family members in front of you,” Ibarra-Frayre said. “There aren’t gang members—unless you are caught up in really deep trouble—kidnapping your child asking you for ransom and sending you body parts. There aren’t politicians, for example in Mexico, who covered up the disappearance of college students, and three years later they still haven’t been found.” The fate of these immigrants lies in the hands of Congress and the Trump Administration. Their decision determines whether Ibarra-Frayre and her family get to stay home or go back to Mexico, leaving behind the only life that they have.

November 2017

BY MIRA SIMONTON-CHAO

STRANGERS AT HOME

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I have lived three-and-a-half miles away from my grandparents home since before I can remember. White paint stained yellow from years of heavy snow and rain, and shingles sagging under the weight of past burdens, it is a house held together by loose thread. The walls, covered in maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, and generations of dirty handprints, are about to burst at their seams as they sag closer and closer to my father’s prized day lilies. We were raised in that house — sisters, cousins, childhood best friends. For all of us, at different times, it was home. The cracks in its walls were, at one point, as familiar to us as the crinkles on our grandparents faces. Years have passed since those days. The hours spent holding my grandmother’s hand on the bus and counting quarters for my grandfather’s treasured Chinese newspapers are long gone. The last printed edition of the Chinese newspaper, fresh from Chicago, passed through my grandfather’s hands months ago. Now my only gifts to him are fumbled greetings and tight smiles; the only counting I do the minutes until someone once again asks me how much Chinese I speak. It was about a half a month ago, sitting and watching my grandfather at yet another Chao family function, that I suddenly realized that I knew absolutely nothing about him. He is 93-years-old, has lived three-and-a-half miles away from me my

entire life, and up until about a week ago, I hadn’t had an actual conversation with him in possibly more than five years. Not only did I know quite nearly nothing about this man, but could quite easily count on my hands the number of times we had talked about something more than my height, which by the way, I’m deeply sorry to tell you grandpa, hasn’t changed since freshman year. I just counted: the number is zero. I had spent hours in his house; spent countless evenings listening to his dinner prayers; for years eaten his treasured pineapple cakes; and throughout my whole life, had never spoken more than a handful of sentences to him at a time. I was ashamed and I was scared. The thought of, after years of borderline radio silence, actually speaking to my grandfather in any meaningful capacity terrified me. Years of what I used to think of as peaceful existence had in fact turned the both of us into, essentially, strangers. Or had we always been that way? I already had, and still do have, too many strangers in my life: I give and receive tight lipped smiles like dirty money and every time wish that each recipient were less of a mystery. And yet I do nothing to change these interactions. But sitting there, my hand wrapped tightly in that of my grandmothers, my eyes glued on my nearing 94-year-old grandpa, I realized how desperately I did not want my grandfather to

be a stranger. Almost every part of it was awkward. From the initial “Can you translate for me Dad?” to when I stepped out the door that second day, it was awkward. I felt weird and out of place in the same chair that I had careened off of as a child so many time before; in the same room that I had played leap-frog until my grandmother yelled so loud that even the carpet shook; the same house that had seen me cry, scream, laugh, and maybe even yodel from time to time. In that same room I felt like an alien: an outsider in the very place I used to call home. But awkward is not necessarily bad. Entering into that room I could not have told you where my grandfather was born. But three hours and two cups of tea later, I can now tell you not only where he was born, but why his nose is so flat a book can be balanced there, or why he has missed his mother everyday since he left China. I could tell you as many stories as he told me. I could tell you all about California as an immigrant, about homemade ties in storefront windows, and books so long they don’t even teach them anymore. But really, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that I was there to hear him: to see his face crinkle when he laughed and to answer his questions, although far less frequent, in return to mine. I didn’t leave the house a stranger that evening, and that was what was truly important.

November 2017

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SIGHTS &

SOUNDS of

KAUAI

1. HIKE TO THE FALLS Hiking to the sacred falls is an easy, muddy hike. Kayaking to the hiking trail is half the battle, and then you hike the two miles to the Sacred Falls. The views are breathtaking and make for a great photo. 2. TUNNELS BEACH Tunnels Beach, also known as Makua Beach is known as one of the best snorkeling and scuba diving places in the world. Tunnels is located on the north shore of Hawaii about 20 minutes past Hanalei Bay. 3. SLEEPING GIANT HIKE The Nounou Trail, commonly referred to as the sleeping giant, is a popular trail in Wailua. The top of the trail offers a beautiful view down of Wailua and adjacent mountains on one side, and the ocean on the other. The trail ends at the top of the mountain with a beautiful view down.

4. KAYAK WAILUA RIVER Kayaking the Wailua River has a new breathtaking view with every corner you paddle around. The trip is great for all ages. Everyone can go as far as they want and turn back. 5. KAPAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;A BIKE PATH The Kauai Path located in Kapaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;a is an approximately four-mile bike ride along the coast of Kauai. Located completely on the coast, you have astonishing views the entire bike ride on the way there and back. 6. EXPLORE HANELAI Hanalei is famous for its extraordinary mountain and ocean views. It is located on the north shore of Kauai. The beach in town, Hanalei Bay is two miles of beach surrounded by wrap-around mountains. You can jump off of the pier, or explore the town that is walking distance from the beach.

BY CLAIRE MIDDLETON

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November 2017

On Hurricane Coverage By Cammi Tirico

Turning a Blind Eye to the Hurricane The Caribbean Islands were devastated by hurricanes Irma and Maria, and no one was there to cover it.

aria and Irma. Two weeks ago those names meant nothing. Now, they will never be forgotten. Causing devastating damage throughout the Caribbean and into the United States. However, almost all of the main stream media has only covered the (minimal) damage in the US. No, I do not want to undermine the suffering and damage caused by these hurricanes in Florida and up the east coast, but compared to the damaged caused in the islands in the caribbean — Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Barbuda, Turks and Caicos, Cuba, Dominican Republic – the damage was minimal. Hurricane Irma made landfall in the US Virgin Islands around 6 AM on Tuesday, Sept. 12 as a category 4 hurricane. Irma was still a category 4 hurricane as it hit Dominican Republic. By the time it made landfall in Florida, Hurricane Irma was labeled as a category 2 hurricane. When searching “Hurricane Irma” on Google, 6 of the first 10 articles are about destruction and damage in Florida. 1 of them is the Wikipedia page. And the other 3 are about the caribbean islands that took the brunt of the storm. Over last summer, I spent two weeks in the Dominican Republic on a service trip building homes for people who lived in tin shacks. Over the two weeks, we made one home – for seven people. But, there are thousands of other people in the DR living in an impoverished community. The houses that were hit in Florida were much beyond the structural level of those in Dominican Republic and surrounding countries. “The bad news is that this is some big monster,” Donald Trump said on September 10, 2017. What he meant by that was that winds can range from 131 to 155 mph and caused catastrophic damage to property, humans, and animals. According to the National Weather Service website, during a category 4 hurrricane, well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months and most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months. However much of a “monster” Hurricane Irma was to the United States, it hit the tropical islands as a category 4 hurricane, compared a category 2 in the United States. 60

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY SACHA VERLON

A Rollback on Reason The Trump administration continues its war on women. BY WILL CARROLL

O Despite the fact that after Hurricane Maria, 100 percent of Puerto Rico is without power, the fact that Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, the fact that there was no evacuation route possible for the isolated islands, the fact that the structure of the homes there at exponentially worse than those in the United States, and the fact that there was (point blank) more damage caused in these islands, there has been minimal reporting, support and aid provided for those countries. When I saw images and videos of the post hurricane Dominican Republic, I was shocked. The airport I landed in 16 weeks ago was now unrecognizable. But, knowing that the people I met and helped better their lives have now lost everything they own and love breaks my heart. An island of 3.4 million American citizens (more than many states) will be in

complete darkness for the foreseeable future. Six days after Maria hit Puerto Rico, Trump (finally) made a disaster statement during a press conference with the foreign minister at the White House. “All available resources, including the military, are being marshalled to save lives,” he said. He went on to say that the people of Puerto Rico are “important to all of us.” The president’s comments were very delayed, and somewhat insincere. It had been over a week when Trump went to visit the American Territory. All in all, the damage done by the hurricanes would be devestaing for any country, but it is especially catastrophic for these isolated islands with unstable structured homes. I understand that U.S. citizens have to be the first priority to the U.S. government, but human lives are human lives, no matter what.

n Friday, Oct. 6, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services rolled back the contraceptive mandate. The contraceptive mandate required that through an employer’s health insurance women were entitled to birth control and other contraceptive procedures. A study commissioned by the Obama administration found that approximately 55 million women were granted birth control without co-pays. Another aspect of these rollbacks is the stricter enforcement of policy that mandates insurance companies be clear whether their policy provides abortion services, and if they do, they pay out of a separate fund. “We will not allow people of faith to be bullied, silenced, or targeted anymore,” Jeff Sessions quoted these words that Donald Trump said five months ago, while announcing the rollback. The rollbacks enable employers to take part in exemptions from the contraceptive mandate based on “religious or moral ideology.” This is unethical for many reasons. While the freedom of religion is important for any equitable nation, so is maintaining a secular policy system that prioritizes no ideology. Contraceptive rights are a healthcare issue, and any legislation that places religious or ideological beliefs over women’s health has no place in a fair democracy.

It is mostly right wing, pro-life influence that has pushed for these rollbacks, but there’s one key flaw in their motives that they are forgetting: less contraceptives means more abortions. A 2012 study by the journal “Obstectrics Gynecology” found that when women have access to contraceptive healthcare with no co-pays, the rate of accidental pregnancy falls by roughly 62 to 78 percent. The fact of the matter is, as contradictory as being pro-life while rolling back contraceptive rights is, the two ideologies hold a common sentiment: a resentment of the notion that women enjoy having sex. Conservative ideology on concepts like sex is often inherently sexist, so while the policy itself is a conundrum to their intentions, a common trope of the conservative mentality is preserved. For example, abortions and birth control are regulated far more than men’s contraceptives or even firearms. Contraceptive access is also economically beneficial. Knowing that birth control prevents unwanted pregnancy, it is estimated by federal economists that contraceptive access without copays saves U.S. taxpayers 12 billion dollars a year that would otherwise be spent on additional unwanted pregnancies. Also, businesses assisting in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy would save more money applying for birth

control subsidies than they would on an employee’s unwanted pregnancy. This is because pregnancy often requires maternity leave, less available work hours, and other actions costly to the employer. Simple access to contraceptive care is a bonus for profitability, and productivity as well. Contraceptive access shows financial gain in the recipients of the reproductive care as well. A study conducted by the National Women’s Law Center shows that women who have access to birth control with no copays save 1.4 billion dollars a year, not to mention the thousands of dollars they save from avoiding an accidental pregnancy as well. Enabling unwanted pregnancies also has health risks as well. A rise in unplanned pregnancy would mean a rise in fetal exposure to alcohol, tobacco, and other substances as well. This is especially risky in the early stages of pregnancy, because some women might be unaware that they are pregnant in the first trimester. Furthermore, the rollback initiated is illogical, impractical, unethical, and reflects a destructive ideology. We, as Americans, can do better. When you look through a lens of prioritizing ideology over science and economics, the result is inherently backwards from that point on.

November 2017

Dear Chloe,

On Self-Love By Camille Konrad

A letter to “Agents of the S.H.I.E.L.D.” actress Chloe Bennet following public criticism in regards to changing her last name from Wang to Bennet because “racist hollywood wouldn’t cast her.”

BY MIRA SIMONTON-CHAO

Learning Self-Love

As I grew up, I learned the struggles of self-image and how to love myself a little more. GRAPHIC BY SOPHIA ROSERWARNE

I struggle. Everyone struggles. Since I can remember, I have constantly compared myself to my friends, random girls I see and girls all over social media and the internet. I have never been able to defeat the pestering thoughts of disapproval. I am a constant victim of my own self-judgement. The idea of being skinnier or having straighter teeth or being tanner or having longer hair has always followed me around. Society creates an ideal that many girls and boys strive for but may never reach, causing a perpetual cycle of criticism towards themselves. The media portrays women and men in a way that girls and boys will most likely never look like. Myself and many others were lied to by flipping through magazines and channels seeing ninety-pound models and only being able to think “that’s what I should and want to look like.” Growing up I was always the tallest, 62

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probably chubbiest, and most concerned about my weight, out of my friends. It wasn’t like my parents never said, “Camille you are beautiful just the way you are,” and “you have nothing to worry about,” because after all, that’s what parents say. I assumed my friends went home and asked their mom if they were too fat or too skinny in different places of their bodies. But, I began to talk about things like a new training bra and all I received were funny faces at the lunch tables. The summer after ninth grade I lost a lot of weight. People began to notice and they would comment which made me feel better about myself. Certain times I didn’t know how to receive these compliments because they came out sounding as if I was in fact, much chubbier before. One time, when I walked in to see my old English teacher, the first thing she said to me was “Oh Camille! You’ve lost so much weight!” And although many would love to hear that, my mind immediately

jumped to the assumption that she thought I was chubby or fat before. I am constantly working on trying to love myself a little bit more and more everyday but that is really tough. In times that I am down it is hard to pick myself back up, because my head only has room for negative thoughts. Finding the room for self-love seems nearly impossible as I find my way. As I get older, I have found how important it is to love yourself, before you can love others. This seems like a simple concept but at the end of the day, if you are channeling all of your love and energy into someone else, how is there enough for yourself ? Something I try to remember is that I may never get to loving all of me, but I need to try and love as much as I can, to the highest extent I can. And yes. I am beautiful. And yes. So are you.

Yesterday my mom told me that I needed to put my words out into the world. She told me that I needed to write to you because one insult can make a hundred compliments feel like trash — so I guess that’s what I’m doing. I’m putting all the admiration and pride I have for you onto paper, with hardcore printer ink, and sealing it in an envelope to send to you. This letter obviously isn’t going to change your life or make you have a deep spiritual realization, but maybe it’ll make you feel a little better — maybe it’ll make me feel a little better. I am a 16 year-old girl from Ann Arbor, Michigan. My Dad is Chinese and moved from Taiwan to the U.S. during the ‘80s to be with his parents. My Mom is White and grew up in a tiny town in upstate New York. I don’t speak Chinese fluently; I’ve never been to China; and sometimes during family events I hide in the bathroom so as to avoid the uncomfortable family friend questions about how much Chinese I speak — not any more than the last time you asked me. Apart from me, the entirety of my family would be categorized on a shelf of families under “strangely linguistically talented,” meaning that the fact that I am not is weird. I, being the uncultured and somewhat delusional child I was, decided when I was five that I was “rebellious” and boycotted all forms of Chinese education. This included the mildly odd Chinese school — cow origami hosted in one room while another room held 20 children screaming Chinese nursery rhymes, held at our local elementary school — for what, more screen time? Closing in on ten years since the day I threw a hissy fit and “dropped out of Chinese school,” I can confidently say that I regret that decision almost every single day of my life. I grew up on cable cop shows because my Mom thought those Disney girls were rude. And, on reflection, they really were. But by telling me that I couldn’t watch those shows, without realizing it, my mother made those girls cool. After the 50th viewing, Mulan had lost its magic and my eight year-old self was starving for a new role-model: the matter of whether or not they looked like me irrelevant. This “coolness” was really important and Hannah

Montana was, according to the White girls in my first grade class, the coolest. And so while my Mom scoured day and night for a role-model for her young daughter, even going to the lengths to special order a Chinese Barbie, I already had my heart set on those rude White girls. The problem, at the root of all of this, was that there weren’t any for my Mom to find. I had seen the classics: had watched Wendy Wu and Mulan so many times they practically became religion in our family. They — Hollywood, Disney, the big dudes — gave us one television movie and a choppy recreation of a classical Chinese story and basically said good luck with the rest. So I was left to idolize those same rude White girls my mother disliked so and grew up wanting to be something I, essentially, could never be. But through that all, I never really thought about what it meant to be a half-Chinese and half-Caucasian female until I got into high school. I was very oblivious, and had never really been forced to think about my culture or ethnicity in such a close and personal way. While it seems obvious to me that no two people are experiencing life in the same way, I slowly began to realize that many people, including some of my closest friends, were in fact oblivious to the matter. I like to think of this theory, whatever thing of mine, as a common assumption that is not directly intentional, but still hurtful. It unfolds as a biracial POC, whether that mean African-American, Chinese, Native American or any other minority, finds themselves surrounded by so many White people that they almost forget their other half, and the importance of it. They contort themselves into a White partial version of their true self: an attempt to relate to their White peers who consequently begin to forget that their biracial/multiracial friend isn’t, in fact, solely White. And then, because they are so into this persona, this thing of their own creation, they, in example, drop out of Chinese school. They’ll eat White culture like breakfast cereal until they’ve forgotten what red bean soup tastes like. Then that day comes. And suddenly they are all too aware of how oblivious

they have become and how oblivious everybody else too has become. They make that damn assumption and they can’t even think about the other side, all they know is their White privilege and they are completely blind. It’s your fault not theirs. Why can’t you just see it like them? You’ve hit the identity rock bottom. You don’t even know what side you should be on not to even mention which side you actually agree with. You’re divided, not down the middle but, all zig-zaggy because all you really want to do is fit in, but suddenly you can’t. Because I mean, where do you really fit? Identity is a huge deal. Whether you’re filling out your standardized testing booklet or simply just talking about your last name. Identity is everything. But I feel like it’s almost something impossible to understand and interpret. Sometimes it makes you feel like shit, like you don’t belong anywhere in the world and that there is no right bubble for you anywhere, but sometimes it’s all that holds you up because somewhere deep in their you are in fact proud to be mixed. So basically you, Chloe, no matter what last name you have, are a badass. A Chinese-American badass who is making things better for all us other Chinese-Americans who will follow in your footsteps. The last name you go by is irrelevant when you’re proud of who you are. So sorry this letter got a little ranty, but it was all leading up to the fact that I think you’re an inspiration. You’re out here blowing the racist Hollywood doors open for something I think a lot of people forget about. Mulan, Wendy Wu, Nikita — you’re up there with the stars. We really need you and we need more of people out there like you. And while we’re talking about needs, all us Chinese-American girls, biracial or not, really need Hollywood to stop being so racist, and you are helping us get there. I don’t know what these people are talking about, but Bustle got that hero stuff right on. You’re an inspiration, a role model, and someone for us young girls to look up to.

November 2017

On Gun Violence By Josh Martins-Caulfield

“Thoughts and Prayers” Aren’t Really Working

PHOTOGRAPHY BY FIBONACCI BLUE

merica has a gun problem. According to Max Fischer of The Washington Post, the United States had the highest rate of gun ownership per capita in the world in 2012: with nearly 90 guns per 100 people. In the same study, the next closest country is Yemen, a country that hosts a branch of Al-Qaeda and is just around 20 years past a civil war, with a little over 50 guns per 100 people. There is no reason that America needs so many guns. Another study conducted in 2012 showed that America had by far the highest number of homicides by firearm per one million people, with about 30 homicides among developed countries. The nearest developed country is Switzerland, with only about eight deaths per one million people. The reason both of these studies — and so many others — were conducted in 2012 is because the Sandy Hook massacre took place that year. A 20-year-old named Adam Lanza killed his mother, Nancy, in their home, stole her three guns, and drove to the nearby Sandy Hook elementary school, where he used those guns to murder twenty children and six adults. He then took his own life. The children were mostly between five and seven years old. The killer used a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns, which were all purchased legally by his mother. This was one of the most 64

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despicable crimes in American history at the time, and still is today. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 60 percent of people say they own guns to protect against crime, 36 percent for hunting, and 21 percent for recreational/target shooting (respondents were allowed to pick more than one answer). But Nancy Lanza had no need for three guns; it only takes one to stop a criminal or hunt or shoot at a shooting range. But she had three regardless. Three guns which led to the deaths of more than 25 people, including herself. Of course, after such a devastating shooting like Sandy Hook, where children younger than six years-old were murdered, the U.S. had to pass major legislation to ensure that this kind of tragedy never occurred again. The great country of the United States of America could not tolerate 20 of their citizens with bright futures ahead of them, being murdered in cold blood, right? Apparently America could live with it, or at least the congressmen, who were too scared to do anything about it could. The National Rifle Association (NRA) made sure that nothing changed, as they often had before Sandy Hook and after. The NRA has such a large political influence, both in funds and in society, that they can get any bill passed or denied that they want. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, President Barack Obama and Vice President

Joe Biden spearheaded a gun control bill that, among other things, would increase background checks for people who are interested in purchasing a gun and decrease the size of high capacity magazines, according to Aamer Madhani of USA Today. According to Philip Rucker and Peter Wallsten of The Washington Post, Biden set up 22 meetings to talk about the bill. In these meetings, the NRA blamed violent video games and little else for the shooting. The bill never passed, as the NRA delivered a scathing review of the bill, saying, “We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe, and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment.” The opposition from the NRA ensured that basically all Republican, and many Democratic congressmen would vote against the bill, as an endorsement from the NRA could be the difference in reelection, all most congressmen care about. The most that was done was a few executive orders by President Obama, and a whole lot of “thoughts and prayers.” Almost every congressmen and millions of Americans released statements or tweeted that their thoughts and prayers were with the victims, yet nothing was done. Almost five years have passed. There have been shootings that killed five or more people in Washington D.C, Santa Monica, Isla Vista, Charleston, Chatta-

nooga, Roseburg, San Bernardino, Orlando, Burlington, Fort Lauderdale, Orange County, and finally Las Vegas, the record setter for the deadliest shooting in American history, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500 more. The shooter was named Stephen Paddock, an old white guy who owned 47 guns, and had bought more than 30 of them in the past year. The media couldn’t play its usual mass shooting game, “Which minority or terrorist group could he belong to?” as they normally do after a tragedy like this since he was a boring, old, whiteguy. There seemed to be nothing off about the guy, according to the media, with headlines like, “Who Was Stephen Paddock? The Mystery of a Nondescript ‘Numbers Guy’” from The New York Times or “The Mystery of Stephen Paddock: Why?” from CNN. Fox News of course had the largest enigma of the bunch, saying “Las Vegas Gunman Seemed Like ‘A Rational Man,’ Steve Wynn Tells ‘Fox News Sunday.’” I’m no detective, FBI agent, conspiracy theorist, or guy who has no clue what he’s talking about hosting a late night news show (a la Sean Hannity), but I think I can figure out what was wrong with him. There is no possible way that a human being needs 47 guns for any purpose. It certainly isn’t rational. The fact that him buying 30 guns in the last year didn’t tip anyone off is preposterous to me, but shows what is excruciatingly wrong with our country. This man was allowed to purchase semi-automatic weapons, equipped with a “bump stock” to basically make it an automatic weapon. A “bump stock” is an attachment to a semi-automatic weapon which uses the air pressure of the gun firing a bullet to quickly load and fire the next bullet, transforming a semi-automatic gun into

an almost fully automatic weapon. These guns are designed to kill people en masse, which is exactly what Stephen Paddock did with them, and the majority of news media, right wing “constitutionalists,” and second amendment lovers don’t seem to see the clear answer to their question of “How did this happen?” I’ve got news for second ammendment absolutionalists, by the way. The founding fathers never intended the “right to bear arms” to mean that any person could have the right to own a gun that could kill 50 people in a short amount of time. The founding fathers did this so that people could go hunting for their food, as you couldn’t go to the local Walmart to buy ribs back then. Most times you had to hunt, kill, skin, prepare, cook, and eat an animal yourself. Back then, the guns that existed reloaded in about one minute: one bullet per minute. The second amendment the founders wrote back in the 1700s is so outdated that it is no longer relevant to any discussion of gun control. At a certain point, the automatic response of the right wing or anyone else under the control of the NRA is not enough. Sending “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims does not prevent a mass shooting from happening, nor does it bring the victims back. A moment of silence is a nice gesture, and we should allow the families of the victims to grieve, but there have been far too many moments of silence over the years and not enough action. Also, the “do not politicize this,” or “can’t we allow the families to grieve before we get into politics?” is frankly ridiculous and idiotic. When is a better time to talk about preventing mass shootings from happening than right after a mass shooting? After we as a nation forget and move on? No. It must be before the “thoughts

and prayers” die down. It must be now, so that while we are too caught up in prayer or moments of silence, another shooting doesn’t happen: leading to more death and despair, and more “thoughts and prayers.” I am not saying that every gun needs to be taken away from lawful gun owners, just the unnecessary ones. You can go ahead and do whatever you like (legally) with your lawful handgun or musket. All I’m asking for is some common sense. More guns do not equal more peace; if that is the goal of the right, then that is an unreachable goal. If one of the victims in Las Vegas had pulled out a gun and started trying to shoot back at the shooter, why would the police not have shot them? How would the police know that the shooter was just trying to help out? The police would most likely think that they were the shooter, and therefore that person would most likely contribute to the problem rather than solve it. To the people on the left or right, and specifically those in congress, do not be afraid of the NRA. Polls show that people are in overwhelming support of at least a little bit more gun control, as 94 percent of people agree with more background checks in a Quinnipiac University poll from June 22-27, 2017. In that same poll, 54 percent of people agree that there should be stricter gun laws in this country. Your only opposition is the NRA; you have the support of the people. Please do something, something that creates change. The American people need change in order to prevent these shootings. Stop just sending “thoughts and prayers” because frankly, the American people don’t need them.

PHOTO BY C. MENDOZA/VOA

November 2017

MINNA TREMONTI What is your favorite memory at Community so far? Last year my forum and I all went to Cedar Point and it was such a blast. We rode all the rides! Sadly though it started raining half-way through the day, but I just remember it being an awesome, fun-packed day.

TERAH BLAKEMORE

JULIETTE SIMONS

If you could meet anyone who would it be? God. I have so many questions and I feel like God could answer them all.

If it was your last meal ever what would you eat? Probably just a giant ice cream sundae.

MALI CHAPPELL-LAKIN What are you working on right now? Right now I am studying for my world history test tomorrow.

ANNA STANSFIELD What is your favorite song right now? Probably “Havana” by Camila Cabello

NANAKO FUJIOKA If you had the world’s attention for one minute, what would you tell them? There’s never a time when you can’t start anything. You don’t have a time limit in your life. Even if you think, “Oh I’m too old for this.” If you want to do something and realize it in a later stage of your life, it doesn’t matter- just do it.

ELENI TSADIS What is the best book you have ever read? Probably “Hidden Figures” beause it’s really inspiring. They wanted to be successful in NASA and it was very challenging for them. It really touched me and I actually cried at the end.

ERIN SIMMONS If you could change one thing about Community, what would it be? The only thing that can kind of be a problem is I like having a lot of freedom, but sometimes it can be a little too much and it can end up being kind of confusing and hard to understand occasionally. 66

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EMILY LANCASTER What are you looking forward to most this year? I‘m going to London this Christmas, so that’s going to be fun!

NED CAPUANO What are you most excitied for this year? The Robotics season, because now there’s like 30 or 40 people, which is considerably more than last year. | November 2017 | 67

1000 WORDS

BY GRACE JENSEN

teve Coron is fascinated by the way we see things. He uses art, specifically his signature style of collage with photos lined up in a row, to reflect human perception. After taking his class on a trip to Italy in 2010, Coron found himself on Photoshop, playing with images to create one cohesive piece that to him captures the essence of Venice. “We’re always re-focusing on different little snapshots in our world, right?” he asked. “And our brain, in its infinite wisdom and complexity, unifies perception. Because we’re always seeing in little bursts. If our brain didn’t smooth them, we would see like the old film that gets stuck. So it’s really about how we perceive the environment.

We don’t sit and look at that water for the whole time. Because as we’re looking at the water, we’re also looking up, we’re looking down, we’re looking near, we’re looking far. That’s why I have the definite breaks. I have these breaks, but in some way, it’s unified.” Coron, as a photography teacher and frequent traveler to Italy, says he has thousands of photos of Venice he could have chosen for this piece. “This one just seemed to work,” he said. “When I did it, I guess my head was in the right place, and everything just seemed to fit, and I was seeing things the way I wanted to. It’s one of my favorite pieces; I’ve got a copy hanging in my house and I never get tired of it. So I guess that tells me that it’s a good piece.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY MEGAN SYER

The Communicator Magazine

November 2017

We are proud to print

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Ann Arbor Community High School

Full Service Book and Journal Manufacturing Since 1893 70 | The Communicator Magazine |

www.edwardsbrothersmalloy.com

November 2017

BOOKS THAT CHANGE LIVES BOOK AUTHOR Koushun Takami

REVIEWER

Natalia Eddy

GENRE Horror Fiction

DATE PUBLISHED April 1999

Quinn Perkins Quinn Perkins talks inspirations, happiness, favorite classes, and more. BY LINDEN KRONBERG

“

In the middle of 9th grade, during the second semester, my friend lent me Battle Royale to read during one of my classes and I fell in love with it pretty fast! It is essentially the ‘Hunger Games’ before the ‘Hunger Games’ came out and it’s much more brutal and in my opinion, more interesting. It involves 42 students that are sent to a remote island and have to kill each other, and the one that wins gets to leave the island as soon as everyone else is dead. I became obsessed with it because there was so much depth and every single character had a chapter to themselves so they were fleshed out, which made it a fun to read again and again because you could focus on someone else every time even if they died within one chapter. [I relate to] Noriko Nakagawa, who is opposed to most of the killing. However she is also terrified of what is going on and despite that, manages to keep a brave face and is able to tend to her friends and to fight sickness and more murder. I personally like to take care of my friends and I’d probably risk myself for them just as she attempts to do in the book. It is a really fun murder mystery but it also has aspects to it that are heartwarming and relatable by showing the normal lives and mannerisms of the teens. It is a surreal mixture of this horrible murder game and daily life and people trying to survive in it. Battle Royale is not for people who don’t like excessive amounts of gore because it has that in spades, but for people who do it is the perfect book!”

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Who are your heroes in real life? Wow. I really admire every feminist that has come before me, specifically first wave feminists. One that comes to mind is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Suffragist women including Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Ida B Wells, and Alice Paul. Specifically Ida B Wells and Sojourner Truth because they fought for intersectional feminism, which I think is really cool. As for people in my life that I know, I really admire this woman I know named Autumn. She goes to Central Michigan University, and she is an advocate for gender equality, transgender rights, and she is amazing. I met her at a camp that I go to, and I admire her a lot for doing local activism. And she wants to go into local government, so I look up to her quite a bit. What is your most treasured possession? Probably my camera. It’s expensive. I wouldn’t be able to replace it easily. Also, I know how to work it and everything. I’m not great with cameras in general, but I know my camera. So it would suck if I lost it or anything happened to it, because I wouldn’t know how to use a different camera. Which talent would you like to have? I would like to be confident in my artistic abilities, like drawing and painting, and to be better at them, but also to be able to practice them more. Specifically, I would like to be really good at drawing, like realistic drawing. I feel like drawing people would be really cool, so I would definitely like to be better at that in particular. Where would you most like to live? A Spanish speaking country. I would say my first choice would be Spain, because it has a very distinct culture. I’m also really interested in learning Spanish, I would like to become fluent at it, and I feel like the best way to do that is to immerse yourself in a language. It’s also close to other countries in Europe, so I could travel while I was there. When were you happiest? Every summer, I go to a sleep-away camp for two weeks. It’s Camp Storer. It’s in Jackson, MI, but for four days out of those two weeks, we go on a trip to Empire, MI, which is where Sleeping Bear Dunes is. It’s really beautiful, and that’s my favorite place in the world. I’m definitely happiest there.

If you could design a perfect Saturday, what would it look like? Spent entirely with my friends. It’s nice out and sunny out, and spent entirely outside, probably outside at the Arb or Bandemer, or something like that. Just a lot of combinations of people, but where I get to see everyone in my life that I care about. I would also bring my camera, take a bunch of pictures of my friends, and take pictures of people I just meet. I think that would be cool. Kind of like Humans of New York. And no homework to worry about! That’s a really big thing. What is your favorite place downtown? The Crazy Wisdom Tea Room. It’s a really nice atmosphere, and I have been going there since I was little. So I have a lot of nice memories there. I also go there with a lot of friends, so I have some really nice memories with my friends there too. Which I think is pretty awesome. If you could choose a last meal, what would it be? Zingerman’s Mac and Cheese. And a really good salad. And ice cream. Like, Moosetracks. I just really like those three. That’s not my favorite meal though. I just feel like that would be a good final meal. I don’t know why. Which living person you most admire? One that comes to mind is SZA. She’s a musical artist, and I really love her music and how she uses her fame and her platform to speak out about issues that she cares about. She is really just this super cool feminist, and she is very empowering for girls. For example, she really values independence, and I think that’s something that’s really important to portray yourself as, especially as a young woman right now. That and self confidence. She really exhibits both of those. I also really admire her style and her creative spirit. What is your favorite class at Community? My favorite class right now is Steve’s film photography class, because I’m really looking forward to getting better at working with film, and knowing how to take film photos. Really I just want to be more confident in my abilities, and get to the point where I can explore the field and the options available. Just expanding my creativity with regards to photography is something I’m really interested in. PHOTOGRAPHY BY iO Soucy

November 2017

community high fashion

a few of the freshest looks seen around community

BY ZOE LUBETKIN AND ANDIE TAPPENDEN

ABOVE LEFT: Much of what Riley Brooks is wearing she got from her grandmother or a thrift store. ABOVE RIGHT: Koro Kouyate says that she buys her scarves from anywhere. She is pictured wearing one of her favorites in her hair. RIGHT: Sawyer Dupree, a junior, usually likes to look for dark colors when he goes shopping.

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ABOVE LEFT: Erika Chesky taking a break from drawing during fifth block. ABOVE RIGHT:Sabina Fall, pictured during poetry club on Nov.13. LEFT:Brendan Novar, a freshman, in the Kerrytown Courtyard. “From Ypsi,” Brendan answered when asked where he got his glasses. Why he was glasses shopping in Ypsi? The Commmunicator will never know. |

November 2017

HUMANS OF COMMUNITY

“I love how we can go anywhere for lunch, and I’ve had a few really fun lunches when I’ve been with really big groups of all my friends and we’ve all just sat and laughed and made inside jokes. I love how everyday is different and good in its own way. If I had to give someone a good peice of life advice it would probably be not to worry about what people think about you and to just be yourself. That’s what’s most important in life.”

angelina smith

grant griswold

“I’d say a huge bad habit I had last year was procrastination because I would always wait until the last minute and that would motivate me to do what I needed to do, but at the same time, I would lose so much sleep. I reflected back on it after the school year and I was like, ‘Yeah that wasn’t a good idea. I need to change that real quick.’ [I overcame it by] doing my homework the day I get it assigned or at least start on it, so I am not doing the second day it is supposed to be turned in.”

Humans of Community BY ARI BARAJAS AND RUBY TAYLOR

The Communicator Magazine

adam mcdonald

iO soucy

“I have become stronger in a lot of ways. The person I was a year ago is completely different to who I am now. Both physically and emotionally. I have become more in touch with what the right thing to do or what the wrong thing to do is. I’ve had a lot of things thrown at me that I’ve learned to dodge or just deal with. If you told me someone was going to come in my life and mess everything up a year ago, I would be panicking and wouldn’t be able to breathe. If you told be that now, I feel like I could handle it. I can take a step back and look at what I have to do, which I think is a good skill to have.”

“I’m Adam McDonald. I’m the night custodian here at Community. I’ve been doing that here for about three years. I’ve been a custodian for a long time, probably six or seven years. I enjoy it, it’s nice having the time to think. Some life advice I would give to someone is to study and go to college. I like to have a positive mindset and outlook on life. It’s so important to stay positive and look at the good things in life. That makes the bad things all the better.”

November 2017

OUT

LOUD Five songs to hear now.

“NOVEMBER” - TYLER THE CREATOR

“FINGERS BLUE” - SMOKEPURPP

“1-800-272-8255” - LOGIC FT. ALESSIA CARA

After a very slow year of production in 2016, he was only featured on two songs, “Go (Gas),” by Domo Genesis and “Telephone Calls” by A$AP Mob. “Flower Boy” is Tyler, The Creator’s return to relevance in the hip-hop community. With Odd Future (the rap group Tyler is most commonly associated with) basically disbanding, many fans were expecting a return to the outrageous antics and songs Tyler has always been known for. Instead, he delivers a mature, surprisingly deep and emotional project, where he acknowledges his own insecurities, tackles philosophical questions about his own identity, questions his sexuality, and gives fans a deeper look into himself: something many have been waiting for. In the song “November,” Tyler not only addresses his fears and anxiety about a variety of things, but also reflects on a time in his life called ‘November,’ which is a metaphor for a place of genuine happiness, a simpler time where he didn’t need to worry about the pressures of fashion, music, and his celebrity lifestyle. His ‘November’ is the summer of ‘06, where, according to Rap Genius, he spent his days skateboarding and hanging out with fellow rapper, Vince Staples. Tyler was 15 in the summer of 2006, and he longs for the carefree, nonchalant lifestyle of his early teens, which is in stark contrast to his current celebrity status. His lyrics, masterfully laid over a jazzy beat, explore his paranoia about his finances, his manager (Christian Clancy), his own friends’ reaction to the album, and his relevancy in the music making community. As a controversial artist — many of his early works include imagery of rape and murder — Tyler is insecure about his legacy and what he will be known for years down the line. He worries that his alternative take on rap is “too weird for the masses” (Verse 1, Line 8), and expresses concern that he will just be the flavor of the month, rather than making a lasting impact on the genre. He wants his music to be well-received and known, rather than the cult-classic reputation that his earlier projects garnered. His need to be relevant and his insecurity about his popularity displayed in the song are especially ironic, because with the release of “Flower Boy,” Tyler established himself as the breakthrough artist of the summer; his work has received wide acclaim, whether from fans or critics — Tyler jumped from being ranked 18th on Complex’s “20 Best Rappers In Their 20’s”, to 4th, ahead of mainstream artists such as Quavo,Travis Scott, Big Sean, and A$AP Rocky. With the song “November,” Tyler, The Creator displays a previously unforeseen level of woke-ness that left many music fans stunned. Not only did he put to rest questions surrounding his dedication and sincerity to Hip-Hop, but he also showed a deep and personable side of his character, that has undoubtedly created many more Tyler, The Creator fanatics and fans.

Soundcloud rappers have officially gone mainstream. Lil Pump, Xxxtentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God, and numerous other rappers with criminal records more wordy than their verses have all recently released albums that have garnered attention from avid rap fans and new listeners alike. Smokepurpp is another Soundcloud based artist who has dropped an album in recent weeks. His project “Deadstar” was a solid sixteen track album with features such as Chief Keef and DRAM. Overall, the album is a quality freshman release, but what really caught my attention was a single that apparently didn’t make the cut. Simultaneously released with “Deadstar” came an unexpected collaboration with Travis Scott called “Fingers Blue.” The song acts as an announcement of Smokepurpp’s signing to Travis Scott’s recently established record label “Cactus Jack.” Signing to “Cactus Jack” distances Smokepurpp from his Soundcloud roots and shows that his sound can reach a large mainstream audience as opposed to the niche community of listeners it grew popularity in. Sharing a track with Travis Scott is a milestone for any artist nowadays. Due to the fact that he consistently delivers great bars and an unreplaceable energy, Scott’s presence on a record has an uncanny ability to drag it to the top of the charts. So far, we haven’t seen this for “Fingers Blue,” but in the coming weeks, after its officially released on Spotify and Apple Music, I believe it will be Smokepurpp’s most popular song to date. The song itself suits both artists really well; the production is made up of dark industrial sounds overlayed on top of an ominous piano loop. With a heavy, shaking bass and rough around the edges finish Smokepurrp ties the record into the rest of his discography. The verses are littered with wordplay and simile, which are rare in most of Smokepurpp songs. The chorus on the other hand is repetitive and ostentatious, a remnant of Smokepurpp’s Soundcloud beginnings. This new style, built around rugged production and animated ad-libs, is starting to gain substantial traction on Apple Music, the Hot 100, and in today’s diverse and expansive mainstream Hip-Hop audience. As these local talents with cult followings transition into A-list celebrities their sound is bound to change and transform. “Fingers Blue” is one of our first opportunities to observe this transition.

Robert Bryson Hall II — more popularly known by his stage name Logic — came out with his song, 1-800-273-8255 on April 28, 2017. The song’s name “1-800-273-8255” is the phone number to the National Suicide Prevention hotline; which makes sense to due to the song’s topic of suicide. The song shows a conversation between a person who feels like they have no option other than suicide, and a suicide prevention operator. In the first verse, a person who feels as if they have nowhere else to turn calls the hotline and expresses why they wish to commit the act. In the second verse, the song covers the words of the hotline operator. The operator proves that committing suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Finally, in the third and final verse, the caller’s voice comes back on the line to talk about their new perspective on the world around them. In a collection of tweets, Logic responded to the feedback he got about the song. “I met these people on tour, just fans that I met randomly, and they’ve said things like, ‘Your music has saved my life. You’ve saved my life.’ I was always like, ‘Aw so nice of you. Thanks.’ But then I was like, ‘Man I wasn’t even trying to save nobody’s life.’ And then it hit me, the power that I have as an artist with a voice. I wasn’t even trying to save your life. Now, what could happen if I actually did?” Since Logic debuted his song, calls to the hotline have risen up by 33 percent and Google searches by over 100 percent. The website which was getting around 300,000 unique visitors now gets up to 400,000 people per month and those numbers continue to rise. Atticus Dewey

Jordan De Padova

Suibhne O’Foighil

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November 2017

Lunch

“BEST FRIEND” REX ORANGE This song goes out to all of you getting over a painful breakup — ideally it happened three to four months ago so it isn’t still fresh when you’re listening. If that doesn’t concern you, no worries. It’s not a mandatory thing. “Best Friend” by Rex Orange County isn’t an obvious breakup song, but I’m choosing to call it that because that’s how it feels. It chronicles the ultimately doomed relationship between Rex and a girl he still calls “baby,” even though they dated for a solid minute and have now broken up. He’s still a bit hung up on her. She’s his “favorite girl” — and he’s pretty sure that he “just might be the one” for her. This isn’t some failed romance formed in the frenzy of cuffing season; it’s love. “I can’t wait to be your number one/I’ll be your biggest fan and you’ll be mine/But I still wanna break your heart and make you cry,” sings Alex O’Connor, a teen from a suburb of Surrey, England better known as Rex Orange County. With these lines, he captures the mix of unrealistic hopefulness that you’ll get back together and the persistent frustration that you can’t hurt them the way they’ve hurt you. He does this in a simple, incredibly effective way where you cannot doubt he has felt the same as you. Being 19, it is probable — one could even say pretty likely — that he has smoked some strain of the classic teenage heartbreak, and it was recent enough for him to write about it. I’m a little bit glad this one happened because it made such a pretty song. Rex has released a few more singles since “Best Friend” came out, in early 2017. His second album Apricot Princess (a nickname for his girlfriend) was released not long before that, and you can also hear him flitting around on some tracks on Tyler, The Creator’s album Flower Boy which came out this past summer.

“MAD” SOLANGE FT. LIL WAYNE “Mad” starts slowly: Solange’s steady voice draws you in inch-by-inch until, finally, you are enveloped, completely, in a combination of smooth melody and rhythmic beat. You might think that Lil Wayne’s normally more bawdy style would break the songs cool, and extremely chill, vibe, but his voice only adds to it. His voice contrasts with Solange’s in the best possible way adding an edge to the song that would otherwise be lacking. With a steady beat throughout, “Mad” is the perfect song for the long fall days of September. Released in 2016 on her album “A Seat at the Table,” it is a song packed with meaning that revolves around, not only Solange’s personal life but also, the political and social climate America was experiencing at that time. Entrancingly relaxing, its lyrics will you wisp you away to a different world. They’ll focus you, relax, and then electrocute you with their power. It is as beautiful a song as it is striking. As Solange says so eloquently in the song, everyone’s just “got a lot to be mad about.” And we have a right to be mad. So this is Mira telling you, you got the right to be mad. So get out there, get angry at the ridiculous things happening in our world right now and, as Solange says, face it and then let it go. Exercise your right to get angry my fellow people.

Break fast Lunch

Mira Simonton-Chao

Zoe Lubetkin

Break fast 80

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MASON JAR MEALS Portable meals to put in a mason jar—delicious and easy!

BY KT MEONO

BREAKFAST

LUNCH

Blueberry, Peach, and Quinoa Parfait Blueberries Yogurt Quinoa Peach Slices

Avocado Shrimp Citrus Salad Lettuce Salad Shrimp Avocado Lemon

Overnight Oatmeal Strawberries Oats Whole Milk Brown Sugar Vanilla Extract

Pesto pasta Cooked Pasta of choice Cherry tomatoes Pesto Roughly Chopped Basil Mozzarella Cheese

Raspberries and Blackberries Parfait Raspberries Blackberries Granola Yogurt

Chicken and roast vegetables Cubed Cooked Chicken Sauteed Broccoli Sauteed Tomatoes Sauteed Squash

Scrambled eggs and bacon Scrambled eggs Bacon ` Salt and pepper Cheese

Deconstructed Sushi Sticky Rice Avocado Carrots Cucumber Seaweed

SNACK

Orzo Salad Diced Red Pepper Cooked Orzo Feta Lemon Juice Cucumber Halved Cherry tomatoes Salt and Pepper Black Olives

Trail mix M&Ms Cashews Dried Cherries White choclate chips Chex Mix Corn Chex Rice Chex Pretzels Cherrios Bagel Chips Butter Worcestershire Seasoned Salt Garlic powder Onion powder

Deconstructed sushi in a jar Sticky rice Avocado Carots Cucumber Seaweed (optional) Chicken and apple salad Chicken (shredded) Lettuce of choice Red grapes Pecan halves Green apple (diced) Dried cherries (optional)

November 2017

Four Fall Essentials

BY CLAIRE MIDDLETON & CAMILLE KONRAD

Choker, Frencescas, $18, www.francescas.com

3 1 A floral, jungle-like patterned jacket is matched with a pair of leather-embellished leggings and met with pale pink Vans.

The Arborialist

Ann Arbor Street Fashion

Top, Urban Outfitters, $30, www.urbanoutfitters.com

2 An oversized firetruck-red windbreaker is paired with a black and white striped t-shirt, cuffed mom jeans, and black heeled boots.

BY EMILY TSCHIRHART

3 Three women display an array of stylistic choices. On the far left, ripped jeans mesh with white Adidas sneakers, a superhero tee, and an overcoat. In the middle, a floral hijab is paired with grey flats and a grey floor-length dress. On the far right, black leggings match with a denim button-up, decorated with iron-on patches.

Sweater, Pitaya, $49, www.lushclothing.com

Jeans, Nordstrom, $70, www.topshop.com

4 A fur-lined denim jacket lies on top of a black t-shirt and is paired with olive green Calvin Klein sweatpants. 5 A flint-grey petticoat is paired with a white button-up, a braided brown belt, navy blue slacks, and tan loafers.

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November 2017

IN MY ROOM with NEVA SIERS BYMADIE GRACEY AND MORRIANA TUZINSKY

6 Tips to Enhance Your Room

BY EBBA GURNEY

1. Use pillows to add texture, color, and pattern in your room. Multiple colors will keep your room colorful and can easily be switched for each season.

1. “I have this poster on my wall because I love the mountains and snowboarding. I also have this to show that a woman can do anything a man can do.” 2. “I have this corkboard to show all the memories I have with all of my friends and family. Also to show all of my interests.” 3. “This was a gift from my brother. [It sits next to my bed]. It means so much to me since he moved away [to] college this year. I miss him a lot.”

4. “These are my two snowboards. Being out on the mountains is calming for me, it is a calming space. I love to snowboard and having them on my wall is just a reminder for me.”

2. Blankets are a great way to bring comfort and style. They can be placed on beds or chairs to make an inviting seat or workplace. 3. Candles are perfect for fall, winter, or all year round. They are an excellent light source and emit a beautiful moody glow. 4. Incorporate photos or other memorable items that mean something to you. Frames can make photos or posters look sophisticated. 5. Lamps are great light sources. Use floor lamps in open areas of your room and always keep a table lamp near your bed. 6. Place plants around your room on open surfaces. Greenery goes with everything and will add life to the space.

5. “This is my dog, Duke, he is always a joy to have around. He is not just a dog, he is a huge part of my family.” 6. “This is a box that I keep in my drawer of all of my memories I have throughout my life. I plan on keeping it to hopefuly show my kids one day.”

7. “I keep all of my awards in my room to show all of my accomplishments I have made over the years. I love competing.” 84

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November 2017

On Acting By Isabel Ratner

Poetry By Ellen Stone

Aris Chalin didn’t know what he liked as a fourth grader. What he did know was that singing, dancing, and being in a show was fun.

Aris Chalin will be playing Jack in Community Ensemble Theater’s production of “Into The Woods.” The musical, directed by Quinn Strassel, opens Nov. 10.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARIS CHALIN

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His first time on a stage was as a Nazi Storm Trooper in The Sound of Music, a role he now looks back on with confusion. “It feels really messed up looking back on it and knowing that I was portraying someone who could have killed a large part of my family a long time ago,” Aris said. “It does feel a little upsetting knowing that I portrayed a Nazi without knowing the history and the story of the show.” Now a junior in high school, Aris knows the full story. A performance for him takes an immense amount of work. It involves becoming another person. “There’s a lot that people do, just as people,” he said. “It’s like getting every movement down.” Looking back on all of his performances, Aris feels his portrayal of the Beast in a production of Beauty in the Beast represents this work to its greatest extent. “I felt like I was in control of every part of my body,” he said. “I had choices for what my fingers were doing, how my shoulders were moving, how I was standing. I felt like I was consciously making those decisions.” The sense of control Aris felt as the Beast is not far from any moment he is onstage. When he steps on, he feels a different kind of focus. “I feel like I can’t let any moment slip by where I’m paying attention to something or contributing something to the story,” he said. “I have to be in the moment always.” This intense commitment to the art form has Aris feeling that part of himself has come out onstage, even though he is only focusing on the character. “It’s almost feeling like I’m pushing myself down — not like bringing myself down — but letting my character develop instead of myself, onstage,” he said. “It’s like I, as a person, have to focus more, and that means bringing out stuff that wouldn’t usually be brought out in day to day life. I can explain myself and what my purpose is through someone else, and I think that that’s really powerful.” For Aris, it is not becoming someone else that is challenging, it is coming out of the person. “It’s just like, ‘Oh, that didn’t feel like me. That felt what my character [does],’” he said. “[That] is kind of hard. Just to realize that ‘Oh, I’m doing these things, and am I losing some of myself along the way?’ I don’t know. Maybe I’m just giving a piece of myself to that character.” When Aris looks back on his fourth-grade self, back then, theater was something fun to him. Now, it means so much more. “I have a responsibility to this art form,” he said. “I mean, not that I have to do things a certain way, but I have to approach it with a certain amount of respect for the work, and for the characters and for the music and for the script, that I didn’t really have when I was in fourth grade.”

Dear Garden Shed After Matthew Olzmann (April) Just now, the tallest trees above you do a crane dance in the storm light as if the uppermost branches could take off and fly down the boulevard out to the river. Tonight I do not want to be alone. Can we gather in you – out of the weather with the field mice, the fat squirrels? I could turn the plastic buckets upside down for seats. Your smell is like my grandfather’s cellar, the old barn: grease, soil, dried parts of ground – grasses and leaves. Sweet & dry. No wonder I want to live in you. (June) Lately, I have had these thoughts about transformation. Carrot tops curl into the sink like green salamanders. What is found under rocks. Or what contains me, my skin. What I have taken for granted. What I hide under, or in. Shedding my skin, shedding my fears. The other day when I went to water the garden, there was a cicada carcass attached to the underside of a cucumber leaf. How weird is that, to be able to just leave behind your skin and grow another? I wish we humans could have changeable skin, like hair color. Talk about walking in someone else’s shoes. Were I green as katydid, brown as grasshopper, my life would change irrevocably. What I would learn. (September) What of risk, garden shed? Envision these baby acorns or hickory nuts littering your backyard. So early, they aren’t fully formed, but here they come. Only babies are supposed to flail themselves to earth, but suppose all of us did, regularly? Wouldn’t we be happier? I just know that feeling of falling to the ground, believing it will hold you. What else feels the same way? My sisters and brother and I used to regularly fling ourselves off trees, swings, down grassy knolls, knowing we would land. Not knowing how lucky we were. (December) Shed, this odd & ugly winter, we have left you open. The squirrels gnawed their way in, leaving doors in the sideboards, little passageways. My father says every living being needs the same thing – harbor, somewhere soft to rest for the night. He lets the honey bees live in the chimney, flying squirrels in the plaster walls. So, come red ones, black and grey, orange acrobat, catapulting off the oak leaf hydrangea like a cannon. Hang upside down from the feeder; eat until you are full. Tiny creatures, make your nest in some warm dry hollow, tarpaulin or garden pot. It is winter in our country & we are afraid. Dear garden shed, we have opened your borders & taken down the fence.

- Ellen Stone

This poem was first published in “Sweet.” Poet Ellen Stone has also been published in “Gravel,” “Rust and Moth,” “The Museum of Americana,” “Third Wednesday,” and multiple other journals.

November 2017

Music By Lydia Stevens

Albums You Should Know: “Hunky Dory” By David Bowie

Father John Misty Returns to Metro-Detroit BY CAITLIN MAHONEY

f you haven’t listened to a David Bowie album by now, you should. Many of his albums are considered classics, and are well worth a listen. However, I get that trying to jump in and start listening to an artist you haven’t listened to before can be daunting, especially when they have as large a discography as Bowie. A good place to start is “Hunky Dory,” one of his more accessible and popular albums. “Hunky Dory” was released on Dec. 17, 1971 as Bowie’s fourth studio album. Although his song “Space Oddity,” released in 1969, had previously reached top five on the U.K. charts, he had not yet reached the level of fame that he would later achieve. “Hunky Dory” was generally well-received at the time of initial release, but the album was not a major hit right out of the gate. This would change a year later in 1972, when Bowie released “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” the breakthrough album which

brought him his fame and helped to cement him as a household name. After “Ziggy Stardust’s” release and subsequent commercial success, “Hunky Dory” went on to reach number three on the U.K. charts. In 1973, the song “Life On Mars?” from the album was released as a single, and also reached number three on the U.K. charts. Since then, “Hunky Dory” has been on many people’s top albums list, including Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003, and TIME’s 100 best albums in 2006. The songs on “Hunky Dory” are all great individually, but they also make a cohesive album that really flows from one song to the next. The album has an approachable feel to it with a unique style that is essentially David Bowie: an eclectic mix of influences that seamlessly blend together into his own unique sound. If I had to choose two songs from the album as my favorites, they would be “Oh!

You Pretty Things,” the second song on the album, and “The Bewlay Brothers,” the final song. “Oh! You Pretty Things” was the first song to get me hooked on the album, with an earworm of a chorus that gets stuck in your head for weeks; “The Bewley Brothers” grabbed me on the first listen with its poetic lyrics — something I enjoy about the rest of the songs as well. “Hunky Dory” is not hard to find online, so if you haven’t listened to this classic album you should definitely sit down and give it a try.

TRACK LIST 1. Changes 2. Oh! You Pretty Things 3. Eight Line Poem 4. Life On Mars? 5. Kooks 6. Quicksand 7. Fill Your Heart 8. Andy Warhol 9. Song For Bob Dylan 10. Queen Bitch 11. The Bewlay Brothers

Courtney Kiley On David Bowie Courtney Kiley, FOS teacher at Community High School, is a long-time David Bowie fan. Kiley saw “The Labyrinth” when she was six or seven, and fell in love. “I wanted to be that girl dancing with David Bowie,” Kiley said. Kiley forgot about Bowie until she rediscovered him in tenth grade. She quickly bought all of his records through garage sales, although she recently sold her collection over Craigslist.

ROYAL OAK, MI — On a humid fall day, Father John Misty returns to Metro-Detroit. In tow he brought seven other band members and Weyes Blood, the opening act. “It’s good to be back,” said Josh Tillman, the man behind the Father John Misty alter ego. He then proceeded to open the concert with the first four songs off of his new album Pure Comedy. The show contained a wide mix of new Pure Comedy tracks and some from his highly acclaimed 2015 release I Love You, Honeybear. After the set concluded with “I Love You, Honeybear,” Tillman and company returned for an encore. Before playing additional

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songs, he had a quick question and answer with the audience. He was asked by an audience member about how he started his career in music. “I started because I was not good at anything else,” Tillman said. “I started as a dishwasher, became estranged from my parents. Played drums in a bunch of bands, started using psychedelic drugs, stopped using psychedelic drugs.” After he was done, he played three more songs, ending with the loud number “Ideal Husband.”

Courtney Kiley’s Essential David Bowie Songs: “Starman”- “‘Starman’ got into his whole ‘Ziggy Stardust’ phase, where he was this alternate, very androgynous person.” “Golden Years”- “A classic song for young kids to listen to because, ‘Nothings gonna touch you in these golden years,” and you’re young. “Drive In Saturday”- “I just like (Drive In Saturday). The change in the chord progression shows how good he is at being a musician.”

November 2017

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