2020-03-19

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE YEARS OF EDITORIAL FREEDOM

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Ann Arbor, Michigan

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the TIME b-side Coronavirus complicates completion of degree requirements for Nursing students School of Nursing transitions to online courses in response to spread of COVID-19 FRANCESCA DUONG Daily Staff Reporter

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, students in the School of Nursing now have to complete their work for this semester virtually while still meeting requirements set by the state nursing board and other accredited bodies.

Patricia Hurn, dean of School of Nursing at the University of Michigan, announced in an email Wednesday that Nursing seniors had completed their clinical placements.

“These requirements have all centered on the basic skills and competencies that are met by an on-site presence rather than simulation or classroombased education,” Hurn wrote.

“Therefore, your on-site clinical placements are completed as of 7:00 p.m. today, March 18th, for the remainder of the term. We want to congratulate each one of

Design by Cara Jhang

you! We are proud of you and your work.”

The announcement noted seniors will be required to “participate in innovative,

remote experiences within your respective clinical groups” and will be updated by their respective faculty with more information.

Nursing senior Jayne Hubscher said she recognized it must have been a difficult decision for the University to make, and though she wishes she could finish her

Washtenaw declares state of emergency

County commissioners respond to ‘unprecedented’ situation, pass measure unanimously GABRIEL BOUDAGH Daily Staff Reporter

Amid college and universities transitioning to online courses, mandatory store closures and limitations on large gatherings, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners voted on Wednesday to declare a state of emergency in the county. The motion, which passed unanimously, will allow for the shift of county resources to assist residents, businesses and communities affected by the novel coronavirus outbreak.

At a meeting of the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners, chair Jason Morgan said he hoped the motion would help provide economic stability and protect the health of the community.

“For the health and safety of all residents of Washtenaw County and

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FILE PHOTO/Daily The Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners votes to declare the county in a state of emergency Wednesday morning.

for the long-term stability of our local economy, public safety and criminal justice system and community social safety net, I am declaring a state of emergency,” Morgan said.

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“This public health emergency is unprecedented, touching every aspect of our lives, and some members of our community will need assistance meeting their basic

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needs, especially due to the closures of businesses and the dwindling availability of basic necessities.”

Some community members such as Keta Cowan, chief executive officer of Synod Community Services, voiced concern for those that are least able to get essential products and support during the outbreak, such as the elderly. Cowan also added that she felt that the county could do more to help those in need.

“I am here because of the pandemic and the lack of response, and a lack of a prioritization guideline, in terms of how we are able to obtain resources to keep the least able safe,” Cowan said. “We are not only troubled because we know that the county has a store of backup supplies, but we’ve received no contact from anyone asking us what we might need.”

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in-person clinical rotations, she said she understands the decision is best for student and patient safety.

See NURSES, Page 3A

HEALTH

MI reports first death from virus Patient dies after testing positive for COVID-19 BARBARA COLLINS Daily News Editor

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the first death due to the novel coronavirus in an update on the state’s response to the virus Wednesday afternoon.

Beaumont Health confirmed a man who tested positive for COVID-19 died early Wednesday morning. The man, who was in his 50’s and had an underlying health condition, was being treated at a Beaumont hospital facility in Wayne County.

See COVID-19, Page 3A

NEWS.........................2A OPINION.....................4A Vol. CXXIX, No. 87 ©2020 The Michigan Daily A R T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 B SPORTS.....................5A

INDEX

2A — Thursday, March 19, 2020

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Despite campus encouraging everyone to return to their permanent residence, students continue to visit Nichols Arboretum Wednesday afternoon.

Represent joins CSG race without executive ticket

New party to challenge Mobilize, Change At Michigan for seats in upcoming Central Student Government elections on March 25-26 ALEX HARRING Daily News Editor

Represent Michigan joined the race for the University of Michigan Central Student Government (CSG) election taking place next Wednesday and Thursday. The party is putting forth a slate of endorsed candidates — without an executive ticket — to vie for seats in the Assembly.

In an interview with The Daily, Engineering sophomore Carla Voigt, a current CSG representative who serves as Represent’s campaign manager and is running for re-election, said she first looked at each of the other parties running in the election — Mobilize and Change At Michigan — but felt they were not going to make the impact she wanted CSG to make. She said Represent was formed because neither of the other parties showed her they wanted to make a difference.

“We’re going to differentiate ourselves from the other two parties because they are saying that they are going to change things and that it’s going to be different,” Voigt said. “But I really was never shown that it is going to be different.

And I want it to be. So we devised our own way.”

Represent’s platform includes affordability and accessibility; sexual assault prevention; diversity, equity and

inclusion; mental health awareness; and sustainability.

There are also platform points specifically targeted toward bettering the lives of certain groups on campus, such as international students or renters.

However, while all of the parties’ goals are similar, Engineering senior Mario Galindez, deputy campaign manager, said Represent’s platform stands out because of its achievability.

Galindez said that instead of using buzzwords or creating five-year plans, as he said he has seen CSG do in the past, Represent’s platform includes tangible methods to efficiently enact the change they want to see.

“For us, it’s about the direct impact to students instead of general advocacy for ‘change,’” Galindez said.

The election will take place online on March 25-26. With Represent’s announcement, the party becomes the third to enter to race for seats on the Assembly.

LSA sophomore Sam Braden, who is running for re-election as an LSA representative, said in previous elections, representatives campaigned for their party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

However, because Represent is not putting up an executive ticket, Braden said their campaign is focused more closely on

developing plans with their representatives that will make a noticeable difference in the lives of students.

An amendment CSG passed in February requires the separation of the executive ticket and the slate of representatives endorsed by a party. Additionally, the amendment also declared there will be no party affiliations next to the names of candidates on the ballot.

Braden said even without this change, the party would not be hindered by running without an executive ticket.

Voigt noted they still have the slate propping up what would have been the executive ticket, but they are promoting the party rather than two specific candidates.

To find representatives, Braden said they looked through Maize Pages and newspaper articles to find people who were enacting change across campus and encouraged them to run for representative seats.

Braden said he did this so activists on campus can use CSG’s resources to elevate their ideas.

“There are people on campus who don’t get engaged with CSG, who are doing positive work and could use our million dollar budget that we wanted to engage via CSG and give them an opportunity,” Braden said. “Something I like about Represent is that we weren’t like, ‘We’re a

party, come apply to us’ … We found people who are making a concrete change on campus and then we wanted to give them a boost.”

Voigt said she is hopeful CSG can move toward acting as a vehicle for improving students’ lives. She said she is optimistic about CSG because of its potential to advocate for students but has been disappointed by the lack of impact the organization has previously had.

“The current culture is just so one of just stagnant non-progress,” Voigt said. ”People are outcasts when they’re trying to do things, when it’s like, we’re supposed to be trying to do things.”

Braden said there have been previous efforts carried out by CSG, such as giving students free donuts, so students “know what CSG is doing.” While he said these efforts are somewhat beneficial, he would like students to know what CSG is doing because they are doing things that improve life for people on campus.

Braden said Represent aims to do just that.

“We should be doing things for students that they know about because it affects them,” Braden said. “If we need to tell you what we’re doing, there’s a problem. If we aren’t affecting your lives, we aren’t doing our jobs.”

Daily News Editor Alex Harring can be reached at harring@umich.edu.

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News

Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 3A

Three faculty members appointed to SACUA in body’s first electronic vote

Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs holds election digitally out of concern over virus JULIA RUBIN

Daily Staff Reporter

The Senate Assembly elected three faculty members to the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs on March 16 and 17 via electronic voting.

The Assembly intended the vote to be conducted in person, but due to the University of Michigan’s guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Senate Assembly voted through the newlyimplemented Simply Voting online

NURSES From Page 1A “At the end of the day, the patients’ safety has to come first, and we can’t risk exposing them to COVID-19 when there’s no actual screening process for the students,” Hubscher said.

“Unfortunately, we’re going to have to finish up our clinical experiences online, but it’s what’s best in a situation like this which is unprecedented.”

In a separate notice directed to juniors sent out on the same day, Hurn said their on-site clinicals would also be suspended as of 7 p.m. Juniors will now have virtual clinical experiences for the remainder of the term and are expected to hold the last two and a half weeks in August for boot camp and deferred clinical experiences.

In an email to The Daily, University spokesman Rick Fitzgerald noted students’ safety is of the utmost importance to the University, adding that alternative options are being developed to prepare students for new challenges they may face in clinical settings.

Previously, sophomore clinical

COMMISSION From Page 1A Morgan recognized Cowan and addressed her worries. He said declaring a state of emergency would help the board respond to the needs of the community.

“As we heard from Keta today, what we are talking about are the ancillary impacts beyond just the public health

COVID-19 From Page 1 In the press conference, Whitmer said the state is making decisions based on the best science to slow the spread of the virus.

“Our administration and our partners and state government are working around the clock, working to slow the spread of coronavirus,” Whitmer said. “Michiganders are some of the most resilient people in the nation, and we have faced and overcome serious challenges before … We’ve gotten through these times together, and we will get through this as well.”

platform.

Speaking to the University Record, MaryJo Banasik, director of the Faculty Senate Office, said she thought allowing voting to take place online was an important way to promote participation.

“We feel that because people were able to vote remotely, particularly in this kind of situation when people are working remotely, we got a lot more participation than we normally would have had,” Banasik said.

From a field of nine candidates, the Senate Assembly chose J. Caitlin

Finlayson, associate professor of English at U-M Dearborn; Allen P. Liu, associate professor of mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering and biophysics; and Kentaro Toyama, W. K. Kellogg Professor of community information, professor of information and chair of the Academic Advisory Committee to succeed Joy Beatty, Sami Malek and Neil Marsh respectively, who are term-limited.

In her candidate statement, Finlayson said she seeks to expand SACUA’s awareness and inclusion of

voices from across the University’s three campuses.

“There is strength and value in faculty governance when diverse voices across the three campuses are heard and we act collectively to promote the interests of the faculty as a whole,” Finlayson said in her statement.

Liu said sharing governing responsibility between faculty and administration is the key to make institutionally beneficial decisions.

“As a SACUA member working with our colleagues and administration, I will work to build

rotations were canceled on Sunday in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Nursing juniors and seniors were sent a separate email on Sunday from Dana Tschannen, incoming associate dean for undergraduate studies at the School of Nursing, explaining why sophomore clinical rotations were canceled as well as offering future plans for junior and senior clinicals.

The email said the School of Nursing believed sophomores would be able to meet requirements set by the Michigan Board of Nursing and accredited bodies though a virtual format.

Nursing sophomore Samantha Toomey said she does not believe having online clinical rotations will put her behind.

“We’re still going to have the clinicals next year and the year after,” Toomey said. “This semester, we’re kind of just getting started, and we didn’t have a ton of responsibilities.

Since we’re sophomores, we still have a lot of time to catch up and we have a lot more hours ahead of us.”

Toomey said she recognized the current situation is not ideal, however, she said she believes this change

was essential to limit COVID-19 transmissions.

“I think it’s a better learning experience to be in-person, but given the current situation, there are other things that are more important than getting our curriculum fulfilled,” Toomey said. “I feel like the health of the patient and student are more important than sticking to curriculum hours.”

At the time of the Sunday email, juniors had recently had their first clinical rotations of the year, and the email strongly encouraged them to keep attending current rotations.

Seniors in nursing have two tracks they can choose to complete: Leadership and Management/ Community or Complex Care.

Regarding the Leadership and Management/Community track, the email noted some community clinicals had already closed. For those that had not, the email said to continue going.

For seniors in Complex Care, the email urged seniors to add an extra shift while they were looking at alternative options.

Hubscher said a lot of students were

trying to fit in as many hours as they could to finish their requirements as soon as possible.

“One of my cohort (members) had considered doing 16-hour shifts at the hospital to get her hours done,” Hubscher said. “In the past, the most we’ve done is 12 hours.”

Nursing senior Joanna Yeh is on the Leadership and Management/ Community track and said her clinical instructor canceled her community clinical before the announcement today.

“My community clinicals were supposed to be at a retirement home,” Yeh said. “That’s probably not the best idea for us. A lot of us work at the hospital, and we’re going in and out of the hospital. It’s not a good idea for us to go into a retirement home for people who are literally the most vulnerable population.”

Yeh said she was not worried about graduating because she believed her instructor was doing everything in her power to provide support to students.

“My clinical instructor has made it very clear that she’s going to make sure we will graduate no matter

what happens,” Yeh said. “She’s gone through all these different modules in order to make up for the hours that we’re missing from being in person.”

Many Nursing students told The Daily they felt stressed and confused as they were not certain what would happen to clinical rotations and classes moving forward as the COVID-19 situation develops.

Yeh said she was anxious when the University first began responding to COVID-19 because of the uncertainty. However, she said she understands this is a developing situation and is grateful to the School of Nursing for providing frequent updates.

“The School of Nursing is honestly doing a pretty good job with keeping us updated,” Yeh said.

“Things are changing every second, they’ve been sending us so many different emails with the changes.

They’re keeping us updated to the best of their ability and I can’t be mad at that. I know it must be hard to be on both sides.”

Reporter Francesca Duong can be reached at fduong@umich.edu.

aspect of things — the residents who are food insecure or homeless, our economy or local businesses and all these other aspects that I truly believe are reaching a point of a state of emergency now and looking forward,” Morgan said. “Everything we do now to mitigate the impacts on our local businesses and our residents will help us in the long term.”

District 2 Commissioner Sue Shink said she and her colleagues have been

working to respond to the pandemic and mitigate its impact on the county.

“We have been talking about vulnerable populations,” Shink said.

“We know that there have been efforts made … We really care and are taking this seriously.”

Morgan also laid out plans for additional efforts that would serve other parts of the community.

“The county has enacted their contingency plan, and although

buildings are closed to the public until April 6, 2020, several departments continue to provide essential services,” Morgan said. “Other efforts include the extension of grace periods on fees, fines and costs, as well as working to support school districts who are providing much-needed meals to their students.”

Morgan also discussed the utilization of the Emergency Operations Center, which coordinates

the reaction to large-scale emergencies in Washtenaw County. However, Morgan noted that the center may only be reached remotely.

“We’re going to activate the Emergency Operations Center, remotely or virtually,” Morgan said.

“There are a lot of those aspects that we still need to work through, as this is pretty unprecedented.”

Daily Staff Reporter Gabriel Boudagh can be reached at gboudagh@

On Thursday, Whitmer ordered a shutdown of all K-12 schools in the state until April 5 and banned all events with more than 250 attendees on Friday. The governor also issued an executive order on Monday to close all restaurants, bars and entertainment venues in Michigan to attempt to slow the spread of the virus.

Whitmer emphasized the actions she has taken within the past week in response to COVID19 are temporary. She said all Michigan citizens have a role to play to mitigate spreading the virus and its impact on our economy.

“These are tough and necessary steps that we are taking to ensure

that we reduce the spread of this virus,” Whitmer said. “We know that by taking aggressive action, we are saving lives.”

Whitmer encouraged Michigan citizens to practice social distancing and to take precautionary measures to reduce the spread of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend people wash their hands often with soap and water for 20 seconds, avoid close contact with other people and stay home if they feel sick.

Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), emphasized protecting

those most at risk, including the elderly and immunocompromised.

She said state labs in Michigan have a goal of testing 200 patients for COVID-19 a day, which they plan to be able to accommodate for by the end of the week.

“This is a very serious situation,” Khaldun said. “As the situation continues to develop, we expect more cases, and unfortunately, we expect more fatalities.”

Khaldun said the MDHHS sent 500 tests to medical providers across the state throughout the past week. She said the state is working on getting comprehensive data from hospitals on resources.

As of Wednesday, there have

been 80 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan with seven of the cases in Washtenaw County.

Two cases of the virus have been confirmed in student apartment buildings Vic Village-North and ArborBLU. The University of Michigan began the shift to online classes on Monday for the remainder of the semester in response to COVID19. The University also canceled commencement and all study abroad programs scheduled for the Spring and Summer semesters.

Daily News Editor Barbara Collins can be reached at bcolli@ umich.edu.

shared vision, shared engagement, shared mutual respect, shared information and shared risk,” Liu said in his candidate statement.

Toyama said in his candidate statement that his experience on multiple faculty governing bodies and committees has given him an understanding of the workings of faculty governance.

Finlayson, Liu and Toyama will begin their three-year terms on May 1.

Reporter Julia Rubin can be reached at julrubin@umich.edu.

Opinion

4A — Thursday, March 19, 2020

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

OWEN STECCO | COLUMN

LGBTQ+ discrimination as religious freedom

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MIN SOO KIM | COLUMN

Does the University really care about international students?

N

ot many students have direct experience with the University of Michigan’s International Center, as only 2,216 of us are actually international students.

The International Center is one of the University bodies that directly represents me and all other international students at the University. However, I cannot say that I have been entirely satisfied with the representation they have provided so far. The International Center could, and ultimately should, do better.

All Korean male adults have to serve in the military in one form or another, unless they have severe mental or physical health conditions hindering them from effective service. I was unfortunately healthy enough to serve in the army and my 20-month-long service began in October 2017. In order to complete the mandatory service requirement, I had to take a temporary leave from the University and planned on returning to continue my undergraduate program for the Fall 2019 term. With the temporary leave, my I-20 — the immigration document required by the University — had to be cancelled; in order for me to return, I needed a new one. I called the International Center to ask some brief questions regarding the return process, including whether I needed to reapply for a new I-20 or F-1 student visa and if an override for class registration was required. I was told to either schedule a phone appointment with an advisor — for which the earliest date happened to be about three weeks later — or send an email about my inquiry. The latter was the natural choice, as I did not have the luxury of making international phone calls whenever I wanted while serving in the army.

I sent an email to the International Center with these same questions, believing them to be simple enough for any staff member to answer.

Five days later, I was surprised by a generic response to my email, but I still felt comfortable with the information and my reentry to the University.

According to the email, I did indeed need a new F-1 student visa.

Without much external information or any similar past experience, I trusted the information handed to me by the official University

institution that dealt with these kinds of issues. This was in November 2018, so I believed I needed a new visa until the summer before coming back, when I had an indescribable urge to double-check.

I decided to call the Embassy of the United States in Seoul myself to ask if I had to be issued a new visa, and the answer was no. In fact, I only needed a new I-20. If I had followed the instructions given by the International Center, I would have wasted the $160 F-1 visa fee.

The International Center could, and ultimately should, do better.

The international student fee is a more recent case of the University’s lack of clarity or consideration for international students. The University decided to add an international student fee of $500 per semester starting in Fall 2019.

At the time of registration and tuition payment, I was filled with excitement about finally returning to Ann Arbor after two years and overlooked it. The $1,000 per school year fee came to my notice only recently, as the International Center updated information regarding the extra-tuitional charge. The center says the fee will “enable the university to maintain and enhance its campus-wide commitment to international student services, programming, and administration.”

The Frequently Asked Questions section about the fee, from the Vice President for Communications for Public Affairs, provides more detail about it. However, the only overarching theme I could understand was that the University is charging international students due to declining state support.

The first explanation for the purpose of the fee was “to address increased costs and expansion of services during a time of declining state appropriations support and pressures on the university’s finances.” According to former Provost Martin Philbert, the University is assessing such fees because it highly prioritizes

providing sufficient services and infrastructure to the much-valued international students. However, while international students had to face extra fees, the University boasted the lowest in-state tuition increase in six years for Ann Arbor in the same article. The International Center does not provide much more information and clarity about the fee, at least on the surface.

I am not filing a personal complaint towards the International Center about misleading information or the fee, but rather raising questions about the University’s attitude toward the international student community.

Immigration documents and processes are highly important and sensitive information for us, as our legal entrance to the country depends on them. To have been misinformed about such an important matter far exceeds the possible monetary waste of $160.

While it is clear the International Center provides a variety of events and resources, including advising, to international students, I cannot fully understand the imposition of an additional $500 fee per semester when the University tries its best to minimize the increase of in-state tuition.

Again, the University is a public institution that mainly serves the state of Michigan in various purposes, so I understand that its main focus is on students from Michigan. However, the University did not hold back in letting everyone know that they minimized the tuition increase for in-state students despite the overall increased costs being due to the decline of in-state support. The University’s decision to minimize the tuition of one group and increase that of another in a time of heightened operating cost does not align logically.

Even the most competent staff can make mistakes when dealing with complicated issues like immigration. It is only right that those who benefit from special services and certain accommodations pay for such provisions. All that being said, I am still left with one question: Does the University really care about us?

Min Soo Kim can be reached at kiminsoo@umich.edu.

F

resh off the departure of former Mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg from the presidential pursuit, many have claimed he bridged the gap between religion and the LGBTQ+ community. But it’s quite the opposite. As someone from the religious Western part of Michigan, the church I was raised in began denying communion to its LGBTQ+ members this last holiday season. The move ostracized me and several other community members from an already unwelcoming environment, as the primary push against the LGBTQ+ equality movement has originated from religious organizations and institutions. While Buttigieg has benefited from his membership in the church, many in the LGBTQ+ community have found historic oppression and ostracization from the religious right.

While not every religious person and institution uses their power and faith to oppress the LGBTQ+ community, recent discrimination has been masked by religious freedom and restoration laws. States across the country have used the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to push discriminatory agendas by allowing businesses, providers and employers to deny services to LGBTQ+ individuals by claiming religious exemptions, as seen in Texas. Recently, Tennessee passed a law allowing adoption agencies to deny service to LGBTQ+ couples, citing claims of religious freedom. Laws like these across the country allow for open discrimination and perpetuate the second-class status of LGBTQ+ individuals, justified by quotes from scripture.

The Supreme Court furthered this divide between LGBTQ+ individuals and religious institutions in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, wherein a Christian-familyowned business won the right to not include contraceptive methods in their employee’s health care plans, despite it being required in employee health care plans by the Affordable Care Act. This opened up the floodgates for discrimination by allowing companies to exercise religious objections.

This precedent was furthered in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, where the court sided with a religious baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple. The Supreme Court, primarily seen as the champion of the unprotected minority, has frequently ruled in favor of religious freedom over the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, allowing for open discrimination and anti-LGBTQ+ biases.

While the courts and lawmakers deny LGBTQ+ individuals basic rights and services by siding with religious institutions, youth are directly impacted. LGBTQ+identifying individuals make up an alarming 40 percent of the youth homeless

population. Nearly seven in 10 LGBTQ+ homeless youth cite family rejection as the main cause for this. That same rejection that I felt from my childhood church is felt across the country as LGBTQ+ youth must grapple with the realities of their identities all while institutions intended to be safe and welcoming are given free reign to turn away and discriminate.

Further, communities of faith and religious leaders frequently serve as role models and support systems for young people, but that is often not an option for LGBTQ+ youth. In a country where LGBTQ+ high schoolers attempt suicide at four and a half times the rate of their straight peers, clergy leaders could serve as an outlet of support for youth. In addition, transgender-identifying individuals attempt suicide at nine times the rate of the United States population and are seldom welcome or embraced in religious institutions. Frequently, transgender support is found in groups that are not religiously affiliated, atheist or agnostic, furthering the rift between religious groups and the community.

As religious institutions have pushed against the LGBTQ+ community and been plagued by controversy, there have been steep declines in religious affiliation and confidence in organized religion. Today, 74 percent of Americans are no longer confident in organized religion and 36 percent of millennials do not identify with a religion, marking drastic dips among more openminded and younger generations. This drive away from organized religion can be explained by multiple factors but marks a pivot away from oppressive institutions to a focus on faith, individualism and empathy.

Religious institutions must evolve to reflect the public shift in sentiment towards the LGBTQ+ community in order to retain their spot in American life.

While I have no doubt that the majority of individuals practice religion to find community and direction, the institutions and texts have been used as a mode of discrimination. Those in power and those seeking to put down marginalized groups have historically abused religious teachings to contradict the purposes for which they were created, to love and accept all people.

The shift from acceptance to oppression has taken form in religious freedom laws that give license to discriminate based on homophobic and transphobic prejudices.

The conversation of religious freedom must shift to one of equality and expose the series of laws and practices put in place to oppress and perpetuate the second-class status of LGBTQ+ individuals across the nation.

Owen Stecco can be reached at ostecco@umich.edu.

LEENA GHANNAM | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT LZGHANNA@UMICH.EDU

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Sports

Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 5A

WOMEN’S MONTH 2020

HIDING OUT

For Maggie MacNeil, anonymity is a secret weapon ARIA GERSON DAILY SPORTS EDITOR

DOMINICK SOKOTOFF/Daily Design by Jack Silberman

In observance of Women’s History Month, The Daily’s sports section is launching its third annual series aimed at telling the stories of female athletes, coaches and teams at the University from the perspective of the female sports writers on staff. Daily sports editor Aria Gerson kicks off the series with this story.

On one side of the pool at the London Aquatic Club, the older swimmers train for competitions. On the other, younger swimmers perfect their strokes with styrofoam flutterboards. Each flutterboard is emblazoned with an autograph.

In the fall, the last time Maggie MacNeil returned to her hometown of London, Ont., her coach, Andrew Craven, asked her to take pictures with the young athletes and sign their flutterboards.

It’s a similar scene every time she comes home. The kids rush to her, asking for autographs and photos. The local radio stations and newspapers ask for interviews.

Everyone knows who she is — Maggie MacNeil, world champion.

In Ann Arbor, MacNeil’s presence is much harder to spot. The entrance to the pool deck at the Canham Natatorium is lined with swim caps of Olympians who swam for Michigan. There are lists of NCAA champions. Soon, MacNeil could be among them. But she isn’t yet.

MacNeil is, of course, still well known within the confines of the natatorium. She’s the best swimmer on an already-stacked Michigan team. She’s a 10-time Big Ten champion in just her sophomore year. Every other swimmer knows that in a butterfly or sprint freestyle event, she’s the one to beat.

But MacNeil isn’t the only swimmer on her team who’s contended for conference championships, NCAA championships or even the Olympics. She was only one of nine who competed at the World Championships last summer. The Wolverines don’t have to pin their hopes on her.

Outside the pool, MacNeil keeps a fairly low profile, not boasting her status as one of the world’s top swimmers. Other than her block ‘M’ backpack all the athletes wear, she could be any other student.

On campus, no one really knows who MacNeil is.

She likes it that way. *** When MacNeil was growing up, one of her mom’s rules was that she could never get a tattoo. But her mom, Susan McNair, didn’t want to seem like a complete stick-in-the-mud, so she added one condition. MacNeil could get a tattoo of the Olympic rings — if and only if she ever got to the Olympics. “Knowing full well that I would never have a child who got to the Olympics,” McNair said.

Back then, McNair’s thought process was sound.

MacNeil wasn’t one of those kids you always knew might be destined for the Olympics. She was good, yes.

Good enough to go to nationals-level meets at the age of 12, good enough to be selected for international events like the 2018 Junior Pan-Pacific Championships, good enough to be recruited by top NCAA programs. But MacNeil hadn’t hit the level of some other swimmers her age, and because of that, most of the pressure on her was pressure she put on herself.

In 2017, she didn’t make the Canadian team for the World Junior Championships. She won medals at national and regional meets but hadn’t quite reached the pinnacle of her sport.

Even teams that recruited her, like Michigan and California, had reservations. She was strong in the 100yard butterfly, but teams were concerned she might just be a one-trick pony. Michigan assistant coach Rick Bishop, who primarily works with the women’s team, wasn’t sure whether the Wolverines were the right fit.

MacNeil, after all, came from a club where she was always the best — better, even, than the boys. With the Wolverines, she’d be in a much bigger pond.

Head coach Mike Bottom, though, was sold from the beginning. He saw someone with a strong work ethic and good results for the club she came from.

But Michigan didn’t see MacNeil as a future world champion — just a solid addition to a top team.

“Neither one of us really went into it with these outrageous expectations,” Bishop said. “I think she truly made a good decision in (that) she liked the University of Michigan. We didn’t have this massive expectation that we were recruiting this superstar talent, and she didn’t have this massive expectation that we were gonna get her to some crazy place.”

Bishop’s philosophy is to take a swimmer and, instead of improving her weaknesses, coach to her strengths. MacNeil was a strong underwater swimmer with good closing speed, so she and Bishop worked to make sure she was the best underwater swimmer with the best closing speed.

That was when she began to burst onto the scene.

MacNeil was used to swimming as an individual.

But the team environment of Big Ten dual meets — the parents in the stands, the constant cheering, the feeling of cheering for weaker teams to win so Michigan’s biggest competitors got fewer points — invigorated her. Suddenly, she was swimming not only for herself, but for 32 others. It took some of the pressure off, because her team was there for her.

In 2019, her freshman season, she won two individual conference championships and two more as a member of a relay team. At NCAA Championships, she notched a second-place finish in her signature event, the 100-yard butterfly, and finished fourth in the 50-yard freestyle. Then, in April, she made the Canadian team for the World Championships. Even

still, Craven’s realistic expectation for MacNeil was maybe making the semi-finals of the 100 fly.

Instead, all it took was 55.83 seconds for MacNeil to go from unknown to the top of the swimming world.

Before MacNeil’s race at Worlds, she strategized with Bishop for how she could beat her biggest competition: Sarah Sjöstrom, a Swedish swimmer who has been nearly unbeatable in the event since breaking the world record at the 2016 Olympics. Her parents watched from the audience, Craven from his computer at home and her teammates from a TV feed at the natatorium as MacNeil went into the turn in the middle of the pack. Then, she turned on the jets — utilizing her underwaters and back-half speed to great effect, just the way she and Bishop planned — to beat Sjöstrom and win the championship.

The Canadian flag went up and “O Canada” played.

It was MacNeil’s coronation moment — and one that removed her cloak of anonymity.

MacNeil went into the 2020 season knowing full well that it was an Olympic year, and that she was potentially on track to make the Canadian team. She briefly considered taking a redshirt year to train, but ultimately decided against it.

Taking the year off would have meant returning home to Canada. That, in turn, would mean much more intense training sessions, without the fun of Big Ten meets to break them up. It would mean constant media requests, autograph signings, photos. It would mean the eyes of a country, pinned on her, and all the pressure that came with that.

For MacNeil, the decision to return to Michigan was easy because it allowed her to keep a lower profile.

With the Wolverines, she can take her training one big event at a time and focus on swimming in one of the best conferences in the country before worrying about the all-consuming potential of Trials or the Olympics.

In late February — before the world was flipped on its head due to the COVID-19 outbreak — MacNeil returned from Big Tens with two big meets coming up. First, NCAA Championships were set to begin March 18. (They have since been canceled.) Canadian Olympic Trials were scheduled to start March 30, just nine days after NCAAs were supposed to end. (They have since been postponed indefinitely, and it has yet to be determined if they will be moved to a later date.)

One look into Bishop’s office, and it was clear which of the two MacNeil was more focused on.

Listed on a whiteboard were four times, a list of teams and a drawing of a medal. They were Michigan’s target splits for the 200-yard medley relay, in which MacNeil swam the first leg. MacNeil sorely wants to win an NCAA Championship, and she wants to win one with her team. As she trained, NCAAs were her main focus. Thoughts of Trials and potentially the Olympics would come later. That’s why, when Bishop reminds MacNeil how many days there are until

Tokyo or tries to gameplan for how to beat Sjöstrom a second time, MacNeil will always remind him: “I still gotta make the Canadian team!”

The regimented, race-by-race nature of MacNeil’s training has helped take the pressure off. So has the fact that she’s in a different country, competing for a team of her own. Most professional swimmers only have one thing to focus on: international competition.

MacNeil has that, but she also has college races every week. She has Big Tens and NCAAs. She has a team around her, one she desperately wants to help win a team championship.

The few times she does go back home, she’s showered with recognition. Not to the point of being overwhelmed — just enough to give her confidence that she can accomplish whatever she wants.

“I kinda like to say I’m hiding out down here,” MacNeil said. “Which is kinda nice.” *** At meets, MacNeil blends in with the rest of her teammates. All of them wear the same blue onepiece swimsuit with the block ‘M’ on the chest. She stays loose by doing TikTok dances on the pool deck and having friendly competitions with the other swimmers. As a sprinter, when she dives into the water, all eyes are on her for less than a minute. Then, it’s a teammate’s turn.

In Canada, every meet is all about her — Maggie MacNeil, world champion, Olympic hopeful. At Michigan, it doesn’t matter who’s swimming as long as the winner wears maize and blue. In Canada, she’s expected to meet with young swimmers who idolize her and provide publicity for Swimming Canada. At Michigan, it would be a surprise if someone asked for an autograph because so few classmates know who she is.

“I’m not feeling as stressed as I should be about Trials and the Olympics,” MacNeil said. “ ... I’m really able to focus on swimming when I’m at the pool and be able to focus on my studies and really have the two connected just because I wouldn’t be recognized unless I’m at an event.”

The rigors of an NCAA program aren’t right for every international swimmer. But for MacNeil, more on her plate means a clearer head and a better performance. The anonymity the Wolverines have granted her has enabled her to develop into a swimmer that may just have to call her mom’s bluff.

Although McNair was wrong about the level her daughter would rise to, she knows there are much worse things that could happen than MacNeil getting an Olympic rings tattoo. Beside, she’s seen first-hand the way Michigan has supported MacNeil, and she’ll take that every single time.

“You know what?” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Maggie happier than I have the past couple of years.”

Multimedia

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Monday, March 19, 2020 - 6

PHOTO ESSAY

Between caution and panic MADDIE FOX

Daily Staff Photographer

University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel emailed an announcement at 4:16pm Wednesday, March 11 saying, most notably, that class would be canceled for the following two days and would resume on Monday via online platforms. The novel coronavirus had stopped time.

We are all experiencing the world in a dimension that we have never before. All museums, movie theaters, performance venues, sporting events, gyms, recreation centers, spas, casinos, restaurants, bars, cafes, libraries and coffee shops are closed indefinitely, until further notice.

This vocabulary has a sense of finality.

Countless store fronts don signage saying they will be closed indefinitely. I know in my mind it does not mean forever, but an unspecified period of time, yet I’m finding it difficult to see beyond the horizon of this pandemic.

While it is in the interest of the public health to close such a sweeping category of places, the demands of public health and the demands of cultural well-being are working at odds with each other. We go to these places

for a sense of community, belonging, identity, pattern, routine and human interaction.

These demands of cultural well-being make us feel human. They have been stripped, until further notice. No social, cultural or any others gatherings will materialize in the coming weeks, perhaps months.

We now must approach this new world in a way that will be productive, rather than fearful. While our daily lives have been so holistically interrupted, it is in service of social distancing. These unprecedented directives from not only the university administration and our state Governor Gretchen Whitmer, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are to create space not just between ourselves, but for those who are more vulnerable, more susceptible to the virus.

While most of us living in Ann Arbor are young and healthy, many of us are only one or two connections away from the vulnerable population. An aging grandparent. A diabetic.

Someone with lung or heart disease. Being aware of our personal health and actions validates that public health is everyone’s responsibility; how we all choose to behave impacts all others’ health.

The University of Michigan closes the UMMA, the campus art museum, in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Walgreens experiences a shortage of essentials, such as toilet paper and hand sanitizer, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ann Arbor.

The Ann Arbor Farmers Market remains quiet during times of social isolation and self-quarantine.

However we choose to exist in space over the next few weeks will decide how we will be allowed to exist for the next many months.

The world is truly very scary right now and it will continue to be for a while. This is unprecedented; no one has all the answers we wish for. Professors must learn new mediums and techniques previously never necessary, while students must do the same and are not expected to be experts at this either. It comes at a strange time as many are not only trying to finish the school year, but also their college careers. Two days after President Schlissel’s initial announcement, he sent another deeming all commencement ceremonies canceled.

Since we are all facing such extreme circumstances, it is even more vital we look out for each other. Not only to slow the spread of the virus, but to consider the oncoming economic impact on those who may not be able to overcome it. The pandemic has already brought every crack in our systems to light; homelessness, healthcare, debt, income and savings, childcare, workers’ rights, to name a few. The virus is begging to exacerbate every single one of them.

It is already evident how this virus is instilling fear and panic in our community.

The panic felt is triggering a need for survival.

Which in turn, is triggering overconsumption and hoarding of goods such as toilet paper, isopropyl alcohol, masks, thermometers, hand sanitizer, gloves and disinfectant wipes.

It felt near apocalyptic as I walked into Walgreens to photograph the status of the store and it’s contents. Now as I practice social distancing, I stay inside my apartment and look out my window to see lone people holding a few plastic grocery bags passing each other like ships in the night.

In the wake of university housing dining halls offering take-out only, many students are packing up their things and moving back to their permanent residences, whether that is somewhere else in Michigan, the country or across the world. The infamous blue bins can now be seen being wheeled down streets, a whole two months early accompanied by cars packed to the brim.

Instead of panic, fear, suspicion, and self interest, we must turn to reason, rationale, and patience as we adapt to new ways of existing in this reality. Even though it is an unsettling, lonely time, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

Literati Bookstore temporarily closes its doors and sticks to online orders due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Ann

Several stores, restaurants and University of Michigan buildings close in accordance to social distancing to minimize the spread of COVID-19 throughout Ann Arbor.

MADDIE FOX/Daily

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B-SIDE: INTRO

b-side

Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 2B

The ‘Time’ B-Side: An Introduction

ZOE PHILLIPS

Daily Community Culture Editor

Hello readers. I hope that you are well, that your hands are washed and that your thoughts remain calm. I’ve had this B-Side in my calendar for over a month. I am so excited that it’s finally here. I remember the day I put it in my calendar. I wrote down when the articles would be due, when they would go to production here in the newsroom and the date they’d be published. Like most things in my calendar, I wrote them with certainty. I envisioned

the future through the truth of the present.

Most of us do this, and we usually don’t notice it. We think about time through a unidirectional arrow of past, present and future that continues at a steady rate of 60 seconds per minute. But time is fickle: Living through the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us this. Time can speed and slow. One minute can be vastly more important than the next, or they could all be rendered useless in the following hour.

As

I

f loat in the current of the coronavirus’s impact on our world, it seems time has completely stopped. Yet, in the same moment, it also seems like time is moving faster than ever. I didn’t consider any of this when I chose “time” as the theme of my B-side. I thought about clocks, and rhythm and even considered the power of suspense. But I did not consider the very essence of time — its unpredictability and vagueness.

I envisioned the future through the truth of the present

The past can change the future and the future will alter the past. The present is a mixture of them both. It is a non-static idea that changes person-to-person, minuteto-minute, day-to-day. Time is universal.

It does not speak a language or hold a nationality. Seemingly, then, we all agree to understand the un-understandable.

Laid out in this week’s B-Side are some of our writer’s perspectives on time as it pertains to art. I encourage you to read them all, and then, consider: What is your time, what is your art and where will they take you next?

—Zoe Phillips, Senior Arts Editor

A few minutes for musing: Looking at time across topics ZOE PHILLIPS

Daily Community Culture Editor

Two hands on a clock. A date in a history book.

Tiny grains of sand cascading through the waist of an hourglass. Time tends to be malleable. Hours melt across disciplines, years stretch between facts and minutes explode underneath microscopes. Each creates a spectrum of worlds within which research can happen, helping minds grow. In Ann Arbor, these worlds coexist quietly among offices and classrooms across the University. I am highlighting a few of them today.

Special thanks to Jatin Dua, Fred Adams, Cindy Lustig, Amy Chavasse and Grant Weldon for their help with this piece. I sincerely appreciate your enthusiasm and flexibility during the transition to online classes and other COVID-19 preventative measures. …

LSA professor Jatin Dua doesn’t think of time as linear. The past is not directly correlated to the present, and the future is a project to be actively imagined right now. Dua studies anthropology, a discipline he says is interwoven with multidimensional uses of time. A century ago, the specialty worked to create a “rupture in time,” drawing a line between people of the present and people of the past as a way to distinguish us from them.

“It’s tied to creating hierarchy,” Dua said, “where some people live in the present and others — primarily those who are seen as non-Western — lived in different times.” The effects of that mindset linger today, he added. Discussions surrounding development, for example, can “presume disjunctures in time” by making assumptions about the prioritization of modernity.

More recently, though, anthropology works to define how history comes to matter. What do we decide gets attention, and when? “This thing that we call tradition or culture,” Dua noted, “is always shifting.” In this sense, anthropologists work with history as a dynamic tool — it’s the context that shapes our present, rather than a story that remains untouched.

This mindset changes Dua’s perspective on time as a whole, too: “Thinking anthropologically about time makes you constantly think about what kinds of forgetting is (sic) required to imagine that we are different from the past,” he said. It’s easy to create notions of progress that can shape the politics of a future, “but that’s actually premised on forgetting lots of things,” Dua said.

“What happens when we don’t think of time as linear?” he asked. “What are all the things that we choose to forget in order to imagine that timelines are linear?”

Dua asks these questions in his own research — he studies piracy and trade off the coast of Somalia in a community that continues to rely on the timeline of monsoon season, even today.

Their cyclical world shapes trading networks that wouldn’t develop elsewhere, yet complications over a linear future still linger in Dua’s studies.

“This idea that in the future ships will be, or can be, automated leads to people thinking about questions around labor regulations on ships very differently,” Dua said. “But then along with this, there’s this idea that in the future climate change will make oceanic storms and other things completely unpredictable, therefore making automation not possible. So there are two kinds of visions of the future.”

Both are simultaneously possible and impossible; the question becomes what kind of future is being imagined, and for whom?

This leaves Dua and his peers in anthropology thinking of the future as a project instead of a destination. His mission lies in complicating the relationship between the past and the present, asking who we place in the past and why. From there, Dua wonders how a person’s imagined future shapes his or her present and past, creating a braid of overlapping definitions, realities and possibilities for time at large. …

Physics has its own kind of imagination, too.

Like Dua, LSA professor Fred Adams operates under multiple definitions of time, though Adams’s tend to be much, much bigger — in fact, they’re of galactic scale.

In an email interview with The Daily, Adams wrote that, when studying the stars and planets, “there are no temporal surprises.” 60 seconds in a minute. 1000 milliseconds in a second. Things progress at normal, calculable rates. Time thus becomes the backdrop of research — an unchanging provider of normalcy.

In cosmology, the study of the whole universe, “time is more interesting,” Adams wrote. “The universe is observed to be expanding, and we can not only understand its temporal behavior in terms of general relativity but we can also measure time by the current size of the universe,” Adams added. This schism between the current, calculable present and the blurred lines of warped spacetime in general relativity adds to Adams’s list of approaches. He also mentioned quantum mechanics, a field that requires a “probabilistic description of what happens, or when it happens, so that our concept of time changes accordingly.”

Like in anthropology, Adams’s research relies on a proper application of all these definitions. Physics and astrophysics require the use of time on a scale very different from our everyday understanding.

To Adams, time shrinks and grows across a radical spectrum of consideration.

Within the Big Bang theory, for example, “we must consider time scales as short as 10 -43 seconds.” That’s one second divided by a number with 43 zeros. It’s the smallest piece of time possible — a number so miniscule our human brains can barely fathom its existence.

On the other side of things, time grows to millions and billions of years when considering the average life of an everyday star.

“Physics and astrophysics will continue to unfold over time scales that greatly exceed the current cosmic age,” Adams wrote, “and we can consider astrophysical processes for times as long

PIXABAY

as 10100 years.” That’s a number followed by 100 zeros; a googol of years.

Beyond that, though, Adams added that people often think of “letting time ‘go to infinity.’” When we try to imagine scales of such length, we might picture Buzz Lightyear’s animatronic arm lifting to the sky as he proclaims “to infinity and beyond!”

But compared to forever,even a number followed by 100 zeros is quite close to zero.

Adams routinely navigates between these extremes — his research stretches across a normally unfathomable range of seconds, minutes, hours and years, a fact he acknowledged leads him to “a broader understanding of time.” More specifically, this understanding comes from his study of variances in actual real time; in other words, while Dua might consider the cultural perception of time by people between past and present, Adams focuses on measurable changes that we can see on the clock.

This difference “should be taken with a grain (or an ocean) of salt,” Adams wrote. Indeed, he is right: From the widest of angles, both professors ground themselves in the same understanding that time is a pliant, ductile tool for research. It morphs based on the question and context at hand, yet remains the steady backdrop for reflecting, analyzing and furthering our understanding of the world before us. It’s a mysteriously flexible reality under which we can all live, think and grow. …

LSA professor Cindy Lustig also studies that reality. As a psychologist, she works to explain those processes of living, thinking and growing from within our own brains. As such, Lustig approaches time through both a general environment and a point of focus. “We exist in time and it is constantly affecting us,” she explained in an email interview with The Daily. As we build our existences across seconds, hours, days and years, the passage of those units also changes our very existence. It’s “mindbending,” Lustig wrote.

As we age, our brains gain the attention that’s necessary to acknowledge that influence.

Especially within milliseconds to seconds, “we get better able to focus on time as we move from childhood to young adulthood,” Lustig wrote. As we gain that understanding, time accrues into minutes, then hours, days and years. With age, “the same ‘chunk’ of time in absolute terms begins to seem smaller and smaller,” Lustig wrote, though

she added that she’s unsure if that difference has to do with real brain changes or a simple shift in the amount of time we’ve accumulated to compare things to. Either way, the fluid nature of our various perceptions serve to reflect the malleability of time inside and outside our brains.

Lustig’s research confirms this fluidity, pushing us to question our notions of who’s best at tracking time. She studies attention in older adults, which is often assumed to be worse than those of younger adults. In her experiments, she asks participants to focus on time differences displayed across a grid that occur over the course of milliseconds.

“Maintaining that type of attention over several minutes is very hard,” Lustig wrote, but “older adults are if anything more motivated and focused on the task.” When faced with distractions like a video playing nearby, though, that same older demographic is hurt the most. “So you might say their ability to stay focused on time is both intense and fragile,” Lustig wrote. It’s an all-or-nothing game of focus, permeated by caveats and subtleties that deepen Lustig’s interpretation of time overall.

This complexity of understanding weaves its way into our creation of memories, too. “When people look back on their lives,” Lustig wrote, “they tend to remember the most events from about ages 18-30.” This might seem connected to preconceived notions about the health of a younger mind, but Lustig added that this so-called “memory bump” is only true for positive memories. When it comes to remembering the negative, we have no age filter. “It turns out this is at least in part because we have cultural scripts for when positive events are supposed to happen,” Lustig wrote. We expect to build friendships, enter marriages, find careers and have children during those years, and our brains are affected by such expectations. “No one has a designated time when they ‘expect’ to get in a car accident,” Lustig wrote. As such, it impacts our memory banks outside of the “memory bump,” complicating our internal timelines and furthering the ocean of interpretations upon which we surf.

In that case, our memories, and with them our ongoing understanding of time, remain influenced by minutes and hours as much as they are by our mind’s expectations of what we are to do with them.

Read more online at

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b-side

Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 3B

B-SIDE

The turbulence of healing: Trauma through the lens of time TRINA PAL

Daily Arts Writer

It’s only been six days since the first coronavirus cases were reported in Michigan, but it feels like an eternity has passed. My heart sinks every time I see another student moving out of their dorm, lugging mattress pads and portable fans across the street to waiting cars.

I’ve temporarily moved back home myself and visited Ann Arbor earlier this week to see a ghost town. Empty parking spots were scattered all along South University that should’ve been filled with cars at 1 p.m. on a Monday. I think back to the frenzy of the Bernie rally in the Diag last Sunday, or the dread with which I returned to classes after spring break, and wish my life still looked like that.

Amid all the adjustment, I do recognize my privileges; I have a loving family to return home to and wonderful friends to support me. Even so, it’s important to recognize that the emotions students are feeling during this turbulent time are valid. Social distancing can feel isolating and virtual platforms are sometimes a poor substitute.

I’ve already been invited to two “FaceTime parties,” neither of which I participated in, suspecting they would instead be more endless conversations about the coronavirus. I’ll talk, but about anything other than that.

One common thread of advice I’ve gotten from my friends and mentors is that “everything will be OK.” “We’ll get through this,” my professor said during my first BlueJeans class on Monday.

Which made me wonder, is the passage of time enough for us to overcome the events of the last couple of months? From an infectious disease standpoint, yes, though projections from the Center for Disease Control show that the spread of coronavirus will probably get worse before it gets better. But from a healing perspective, how long will it take to throw off the emotional baggage coronavirus has brought to communities? How long before the xenophobia and paranoia die down?

Which brings me to my central question: Does

time heal trauma? After this crisis has blown over, I believe we will be able to safely say the coronavirus classifies as a form of community trauma. This pandemic has the potential to inform the way we see the world for decades to come. As much as we like to believe otherwise, healing involves much more than just the passing of time.

Part of the reason time can’t “cure” healing is that healing has an incredibly fluid definition to begin with — a simple Google search will show you as much. I constantly hear from friends and family that “time numbs pain.” Before writing this, I’d assumed that the passage of time almost informed healing and was an integral part of it.

Recognizing my gaps of knowledge in the field of healing, I caught up with two experts to hear their insights.

“Healing is to never forget what has happened,” said Laura Monschau, an embedded psychologist with Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School. Monschau has served as a psychologist at the University for over 20 years, including seven spent at the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center (SAPAC). “The healing journey is both how to put a foot into the past and feel what was unendurable at the time, and also bring it forward into the future,” Monschau said.

Listening to Monschau made me realize I’d always thought of healing as a necessary step, an inevitable hurdle to be crossed, instead of an ongoing way to incorporate trauma into my being. In Monschau’s view, healing is less an endpoint and more a lifelong process. Trauma patients rarely feel as though they are suddenly healed. This feeling is universal — we can be reminded of our past at any moment, and thus have to learn to live with it, accepting it as a part of us and shaping our life around it.

Monschau draws many of her perspectives from Judith Herman, a feminist and social justice-oriented psychologist who’s 1992 book “Trauma and Recovery” offers a three-tiered view of healing. Herman’s last stage involves integrating the trauma into one’s being and moving forward. If this isn’t realized, no amount

of time will help.

Barbara Niess-May, executive director of SafeHouse, a sexual assault and domestic abuse shelter in Ann Arbor, thinks of healing in a different light. “First, survivors need to be safe,” Niess-May said. For some, this safety can be hard to come by. SafeHouse handles over 6,000 cases of sexual and domestic abuse every year, and often the most difficult leap is making survivors feel secure while understanding that safety won’t necessarily assuage their memories.

“When they’re ready to talk about it, people don’t believe them,” Niess-May said. The #MeToo era has helped in this respect, and as more women feel comfortable bringing their allegations forward, campaigns like Start by Believing urge us to listen to survivors rather than doubt their stories.

Regardless of what healing constitutes, both Monschau and Niess-May agree that time isn’t the end-all cure. Time has the capacity to change the way we see events — for example, that breakup two years ago probably doesn’t have the same sting now as it did then — but rarely is it the solution. According to a 2016 study by psychologists at Arizona State University, creating expectations for when someone should be “healed” is usually not helpful and a poor heuristic to follow. Monschau stressed the importance of honoring everyone’s “trajectories of resilience” in their individual journey toward healing. “It can’t be rushed,” Monschau said. “It’s a lifetime journey of reintegration.”

Time can also alter the way we see traumatic events by drawing us out of linear time. We’ve been trained to think of time in a linear sense, progressing from one scheduled event to another, morning to night, but a trauma-riddled brain doesn’t see events as a continuous string.

“There’s a liminality to time. You can feel like you’re in linear, everyday time, and suddenly you’re pulled,” Monschau said. Remembering a traumatic event can make time slow down, and this transitory time can make us feel like we’re not in the past or present, but somewhere in-between. Think back to a pivotal moment in your life, and chances are you remember it in

bursts of memory. In a car crash last summer, I remember the crunching sound of metal and the feeling of my heart dropping somewhere beyond my stomach, but my memories of immediately before and after the crash are hazy.

This pull away from linear time isn’t exclusive to the traumatic event alone. Superficial everyday events can serve as triggers and remind us of our trauma. Niess-May believes this is especially damaging for survivors. “Your brain can train you to think normal situations are dangerous,” said Niess-May. Niess-May has worked with many survivors over her near two decades as SafeHouse Executive Director, some who remember sensory details like the song that played in the background during their assault, even years later.

Niess-May, a survivor of sexual assault herself, is still reminded of the life-changing event 30 years later. “There are days when I feel like I’m good,” Niess-May said, “But other days when I’m like wow, that really reminded me of what happened.”

If time doesn’t necessarily facilitate healing, I wondered if the opposite was true: Could time hurt the healing process? Maybe. In extreme cases, Monschau said, “... time can almost seal the trauma in.” Unable to cope with trauma in their past, people may get stuck in a repetitive cycle of remembrance sometimes linked to social isolation. More commonly, trauma may remain underground while life flies by, but reappear suddenly and intensely. In this way, time can give you the false illusion of forgetting while never truly letting you escape. Post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be manifestations of this trauma kinesthetically locked in the body, like a caged animal unable to escape. It’s less about diverting your attention until the trauma doesn’t hit with the same ferocity and more about understanding that the trauma may never completely leave you.

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The power of time in the current age of COVID-19 NINA MOLINA Daily Arts Writer

Time is an active friend. It skips, f lies, races and slows. It’s spent and wasted. It’s on our hands and walls and microwaves. In moments of joy, we never have enough of it..

And, in a few indelible moments in our lives, time holds its breath and stands completely still.

Last Wednesday afternoon, I sat with my friends at a booth in the Dana Building, laptops burning our eyes, only glancing up for groans about MSU closing before us. I thought I wanted a week off, even two. When the announcement popped up in my friend’s Twitter feed, though, time indefinitely ceased its ever-forward march.

Everyone at that table was a transfer student I met through serendipitous circumstances — a transfer tour of Hatcher in August, Artscapade, a transfer dinner event, a friend of a friend at a party. We all carved spaces and homes for ourselves here after everyone else. We knew not to ask too many questions of the “before,” all being from other colleges or breaks from college.

For the first time in a while, we had built a community we loved. In an instant, that new life crumbled. My heart dropped through the cloth-covered couch and onto the f loor.

At a nearby table, a boy threw a bunch of

paper into the air in either frustration or relief.

Whenever I am in doubt or confused of what to make of the world, I run to the Oxford English Dictorionary’s online database. This moment was no different.

If defined as a verb, to “time” is “To befall, to happen.” When the coronavirus became real, it fell over our table of friends like a blanket of virgin snow, silent and eerie. We looked at each other and I tried to choose a single emotion. I tried to pluck something from my turning mind and racing heart. I couldn’t pin down anything, so I settled on having everyone over at my place one last time.

That night, we crowded around the TV in my living room, news headlines f lashing every few minutes. I lit a scented candle, a meager attempt at diffusing the anxiety palpable in the silences of our conversation.

A reporter’s voice boomed around the apartment walls as we ate the cassava cake I had baked. It felt as though we were plopped down into a new reality, a new era of existence.

The OED’s 3a. definition of “time” reads as “a period in the existence or history of the world; an age, an era.” Growing up, I was told that everyone remembered where they were on 9/11. My older brother remembers kneeling in front of our TV, staring at the towers crumbling like Legos while my

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mother frantically dialed our family in New York.

I think we’ll remember when COVID-19 became real, all of us scrambling to figure out how something could change our lives so fast. Just as 2001 ushered in the era defined by survellience, war and terrorism, 2020’s coronavirus has altered public consciousness permenantly, claiming a new time in our lives.

In true Shakespearean tragedy-worthy irony, my English class’s unit on public poetry and health started last week. We are reading Anne Boyer’s 2019 poetic memoir “The Undying” about her breast cancer diagnosis, how she grappled with her rearranged reality, and its aftershocks in politics. Boyer writes, “if that suffering does not meet sufficient language, those

who endure that suffering must come together to invent it.” Just as she endured a reordering of language of her new reality of “sonograms,” “imaging,” and the word “ill,” we too have a new language of our time filled with “respiratory,” “coronavirus,” “social distancing,” “quarantining” and “generational war.”

Though some of us are enduring the same isolation as Boyer, there is, and will always be, time. Time to make TikToks with our siblings stuck in the house with us. Time to sit and watch that new series on Netf lix (between our BlueJeans lectures of course).

Time to realize that loneliness and isolation caused by a public health crisis is simply a concept, a construction that can be pushed aside for taking the time to realize the humanity of those closest to us.

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Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 4B

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The timeliness of starting a new, routine art practice EMILY CONSIDINE Editorial Page Editor

I’m terrible at keeping journals. I admire their purpose, but I can never keep up with the commitment. I always stop to doodle and quickly get sick of hearing myself talk about the same things over and over.

Despite the distracting nature, I’m still fascinated by the concept of tracking growth over time. Some of my favorite artworks are those that do exactly that – without a clear end goal. Instead of developing an art piece based on an argument the artist wants to make, these works develop a framework for creating and let time take the reigns. Maybe the piece does make an argument, but it appears organically as the work incrementally changes. It’s not the driving force. It’s timebased, but instead of the “time as a medium” mindset of other “time-based” art forms like film or performance, this type of work invites the force of time to be a co-artist.

Bre Boersma’s 2018 Sunrise Trek project is a great example of this. Every morning for a summer, Boersma woke up at 5:45 a.m., took a picture of the sunrise and created a color palette of it. The framework is simple, but the results are intriguing. You can take a lot of conclusions from this work if you want – maybe we should wake up earlier, maybe we should appreciate sunrises more, but it’s not about the conclusions. It’s about the process of letting forces beyond our control drive what we make.

There’s a concept that information designer Giorgia Lupi calls “data humanism,” which champions the collection and visualization of subjective, complex and personal data. She makes highly rendered, sprawling depictions of gathered information that take time to interpret. Every one of Lupi’s graphs needs a key. Her infographics are beautiful, yes, but their delight goes beyond aesthetics. They’re a way of telling a story by inviting the listener to look closely and put together the pieces.

But not just any story. It’s always a personal story, as benign as showing every instance Lupi looked at a clock in a day and as emotionally heavy as representing the daily experiences of a child with a serious illness. Lupi knows and embraces the fact that these works cannot help but be subjective.

That’s what communication is: a flawed interpretation and subsequent representation of a subject. We unavoidably filter everything we say, show, write and express through our own viewpoints. That’s what art is, too.

At a young age, I switched from keeping journals to sketchbooks. I’ve got piles of them at home, going back to when I was seven or eight years old. A lot of the sketches are

embarrassing to look at now, and I probably won’t ever show them to anyone else. But I’m glad I kept them. It’s a record of change that I never could have predicted, both in the development of artistic skills and the development of my own personality.

I can track my growth over time, from drawing princesses as a child up through my emo comic book phase as a teenager. I can look through these drawings and pinpoint the moment I decided to go to art school. I have nearly 50 sketches of the same friend over the course of four years, showcasing not only my friend’s rapidly-changing haircuts, but the way our friendship changed over time.

The University of Michigan Museum of Art has a piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called “Untitled (March 5th) #2” which consists of two lightbulbs, cords intertwined, affixed to a wall. Either of the lightbulbs can go out at any time. One of them will always go out before the other, but the artist and the museum have no control over when that happens. It’s a simple but profound framework where the outcome is determined by time.

Gonzalez-Torres made this piece in response to the AIDS crisis after the 1991 diagnosis of his lover, Ross Laycock. It’s one of many lightbulb pieces he made in the years after, a way to deal with ideas of connection and mortality in a time of hurt and uncertainty.

Right now, we’re also living through a time of uncertainty. No one knows exactly how our days are going to progress or how life will change. It’s set a lot of people’s lives and art goals into limbo – canceled shows and lack of access to materials and equipment can be a major setback for professional and amateur artists alike. But rather than be consumed with frustration at the roadblocks to other projects, there’s another option: Start something new.

You don’t have to set up a time-consuming, complex framework. You don’t have to know how or when you’re going to end it. There’s something comforting about starting an art project without planning the finish. It means accepting that you don’t have total control over what happens next.

As someone who revels in careful routine and planning, it can be worrisome to give up any control. But you can still set parameters for yourself. Maybe you photograph all of your daily meals. Maybe you record yourself playing a song every day. Maybe you make color swatches based on your outfits. Maybe you stick with a tried-and-true journal.

Maybe, if you’re like me, you just set aside daily time to sketch.

So if you’re stuck in limbo, worrying about the future, try starting a routine art practice.

Let time work with you, and see what happens next.

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A ranking on time travel: From the best to the worst SABRIYA IMAMI Daily Arts Writer

As weird as it may sound, time travel is a common topic of conversation in my family. This is mostly because my sister just doesn’t understand it. Any time we watch a time travel movie, we end up spending hours discussing the logistics behind the warped chronology that the characters inevitably go through, and we usually end up more confused than we began. In our terms, to accomplish time travel correctly, there have to be repercussions for all of the character’s actions without unresolved or confusing gaps in the timeline. While I am by no means an expert in this topic, I’d like to think that I do know a little bit about time travel in movies, at least enough to explain which movies make sense and which ones don’t.

I’ll start with one that doesn’t: “Avengers: Endgame.” In the simplest of terms, the movie revolves around the Avengers venturing into the past to get the Infinity Stones that control the universe.

But it isn’t exactly a simple concept. The directors of the film, Joe and Anthony Russo (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), pioneered an entirely new way of time travel. Their new method insinuated that any change a character made to the past didn’t affect their original future; rather, it affected a new future. What does that mean? To be honest, I’m not sure anyone really knows. The best way that I could understand it was that any time you go back in time and change something, you create a new alternate reality.

This is a fine concept, I suppose, but only if it’s consistent … and it isn’t. For one thing, if Steve Rogers (Chris Evans, “Knives Out”) goes back in time and lives a life with Peggy (Hayley Atwell, “Christopher Robin”) — which he does — wouldn’t that then create an alternate reality, or an alternate ‘future’? So how does Old Man Steve show up in the Avengers’ reality, having lived a life with Peggy? According to the Russo brothers’s rules, he shouldn’t be able to. Also, when Steve and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, “Iron Man”) go back to the ’70s to retrieve the Tesseract and Pym Particles, how is Tony’s father Howard (John Slattery, “Churchill”) an old man when Peggy, who is presumably around the same age as him, appears virtually the same thirty years after we last saw her? Again, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll never really forgive the Russo Brothers for messing with my mind the way they did with “Endgame.”

“Back to the Future” remains one of the most iconic examples of time travel and does it more correctly than “Endgame” does, but plenty of concepts in that film remain difficult to swallow, continuitywise. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox, “The Frighteners”) accidentally goes back in time, interrupts his parents’ meeting and has to hurry to reintroduce them to ensure that he exists in the future. But how do Marty’s parents and Biff (Thomas Wilson, “The Heat”) not recognize ‘Calvin Klein’ when Marty himself grows up to look just like him? Shouldn’t they all remember the kid that had such a huge impact on their lives? After all, ‘Calvin’ helped George McFly (Crispin Glover, “Hot Tub Time Machine”) and Lorraine Banes (Lea Thompson, “Howard the Duck”) get together while ruining Biff’s car with manure in the process. However, I will admit that this film did a pretty good job with time travel, especially considering the fact that it was such a new idea in the ’80s. Most of the time travel continuity problems in the “Back to the Future” franchise stem from the fact that almost all the time travelling that Marty and Doc do involves either past renditions of themselves or the past versions of people that they know, thus teaching me that if anyone ever does decide to time travel, they should not meddle with events their ancestors were a part of. In fact, if time travel ever does exist, it should only be used to passively observe history.

This brings me to my final example of time travel, the movie that does it the best … “Mr. Peabody and Sherman.” A lot of people might overlook this film due to the fact that it’s categorized as a children’s movie, but not only is this probably the only movie I’ve ever seen that has done time travel correctly, it’s also just an awesome, entertaining film. Mr. Peabody, voiced by Ty Burrell (“Modern Family”), and his son Sherman, voiced by Max Charles (“The Angry Birds Movie”), use Mr. Peabody’s invention, the WABAC Machine, to time travel to important historical events to teach Sherman about history. This movie shows that there are repercussions to time travel that go beyond just getting stuck in the past, like what happens to Marty. You could destroy the entire universe with time travel. This is why, in all honesty, time travel should just never, ever exist.

There are too many variables and too many ways to mess up everything. And there is, unfortunately, no Mr. Peabody in the real world to save us all when we inevitably screw everything up when we try to time travel.

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Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 5B

B-SIDE: BOOKS NOTEBOOK

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Vonnegut’s concept of time KARI ANDERSON Daily Arts Writer

In 10th grade English, as our final book of the year, my class cracked open Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel “SlaughterhouseFive.” After a grueling year of classics like “Gulliver’s Travels,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “The Canterbury Tales,” I assumed that “SlaughterhouseFive” would be more of the same longwinded stories that had populated our classes up to that point. The title reminded me of “Animal Farm” and filled me with expectations of complex allegories or tedious legends from a slaughterhouse.

But as I read the first few chapters, I was surprised to find that “SlaughterhouseFive” was, well, good.

Now in college, I remember very few things from that first time I read Vonnegut’s novel. I remember something about aliens and a celebrity named Montana. I remember descriptions of the Dresden firebombing, which at the time I didn’t realize was a true historical event. Most importantly, I remember a description of an idea of time, one that may have come from the book itself or possibly my teacher attempting to explain this complex idea. The way to think of the timeline of someone’s life, according to Vonnegut’s ideas and my teacher’s careful explanation, is not as a straight line, as we tend to think, but similar to a book. When you hold a book in your hands, you hold the entire story, start to finish; every event in the book has already been written. While we are logically programmed to read the book from start to end, this is not the only way to experience its events. You can open the book to any page, any time in the story and you will be able to experience that event even if it is done out of order. This is the idea of time as a fourth dimension, beyond the three dimensions of space.

Vonnegut’s novel itself is utterly perplexing in many ways. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is partially first-person, narrated by a standin for Vonnegut, and partially third-person, with a grand sense of omniscience. In the introduction, the narrator tells you exactly how the book will begin (“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”) and exactly how it will end (“Poo-tee-weet?”). It’s a novel impossible to place into a single genre, filled with war and aliens and inherent human grief. It toes a line between historical fiction and science fiction that few authors have accomplished. But what is most perplexing is the way that “Slaughterhouse-Five” proposes the concept of time, a proposal that forever changed the way I thought about time.

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” the narrator tells us at the beginning of the first chapter. Billy’s journey throughout the novel is not linear, but spastic, bouncing between events in his life without rhyme or reason. These jumps tend to be triggered at

particularly desperate or traumatic moments and often result in skipping full decades. This is connected to Billy’s experience as a soldier in Dresden, Germany, where he survives being a prisoner-of-war as well as the destructive firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After the war, Billy is hospitalized for PTSD; it’s around this time that he starts becoming unstuck, and the two things are clearly linked.

Even if being unstuck is the product of a psychiatric disorder, it’s still fascinating to consider. Despite his position in time, Billy also believes that he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that keeps him in a zoo. Importantly, the Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions; rather than the three dimensions of space that humans remain limited to understanding, the Tralfamadorians see our three dimensions plus time. According to the Narrator, this means that they view the idea of life and death differently: “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” This view of time means that one can view their life much more holistically; rather than focus on the loss of one moment, the Tralfamadorians find the life in previous moments. This ties to the common Tralfamadorian saying: “So it goes.” What has happened has happened, and what is going to happen will; so it goes.

Films, books and other media dealing with time travel often try to explore the idea of changing the past or the future. Plotlines are based around acting on questions like “What would I have done differently?” and “How do I prevent this from happening?”

I’ve sometimes heard questions like “would you kill baby Hitler” thrown around, often jokingly and with little regard for the reality of the space-time continuum. In Vonnegut’s proposed version of time, however, these questions are irrelevant. Changing the past means that this version of the future would not exist, and if we’ve learned anything from Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven,” it’s that trying to change the future usually results in making it happen.

I should clarify that I don’t believe this means we don’t have free will, nor that we should believe that actions don’t have real consequences. In the novel, Billy becomes fatalistic, believing that all events and actions come down to destiny. I don’t agree. Instead, it’s about trying to find a balance in between these ideas — finding a way to live in the moment without dwelling on a past or a future over which you have no control. It’s the idea of viewing time not just as a long line stretching somewhere into the future, but into something a bit more elastic in both directions.

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‘Interstellar’: Love and time DIANA YASSIN Daily Arts Writer

I tie “Interstellar” to the concept of time because of how rooted it is to a specific time in my life. I was 18 years old when I first watched the movie in my AP Literature and Composition class. I knew nothing of it other than that it starred Matthew McConaughey and came out in 2014 — my freshman year of high school.

When we watched it, I was a month shy of graduating. I can’t tell you the run time, or at what point I truly felt myself reeled in, but I bawled my eyes out and forgot about the assignment all together.

I am currently 21 years old and the same still stands: I will, without a doubt, bawl my eyes out to “Interstellar,” though it doesn’t feel the same way it did three years ago. I don’t know if this is a cliche or not, but the older I get, the more it dawns on me how stagnant artwork itself can be while its meaning is personal and ever-evolving. I think that’s because we are everevolving — which brings me back to the movie in question.

The running theme (in the most figurative sense) of the movie is time — running time, the physics of time and lost time. The movie takes place in a mid-21st century America plagued by blights and dust storms. Culture has regressed into a posttruth society in which the younger generation is taught that events and ideas like the moon landing and space travel are hoaxes. The story is told through the lens of farmer Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot. After accidentally tracing geographic coordinates to a secret NASA facility, Cooper is recruited to pilot Endurance, a team of volunteers tasked with finding an alternative earth. Alongside this ambition are grave risks, namely the time variance between space travel that occurs far more rapidly than that of Earth’s.

There’s a moment before Cooper’s ascent to space in which his daughter Murph protests his departure. Cooper brushes this off by joking that he might be back on Earth by the time him and Murph are the same age. This joke sours by the time Murph reaches his age and he is (spoiler) not back. After watching a stream of videos that accumulated from his son Donald, Cooper watches the 23 years he lost flash before his eyes. He gradually moves from embracing these moments to crying at the realization that his children have grown up without him. Every time, I cry as Hans Zimmer’s “Main Theme” for “Interstellar” plays in the background, knowing what is to come. I lose it once the music stops; looking up at the screen before him, Cooper

finds an adult version of his daughter calling him a “bastard,” still visibly upset for his leaving.

I think about this scene a lot because I’ve been in Murph’s place. I grew up not seeing one of my parents a lot, and this is an anger I still wrestle with as an adult. Can a parent truly care if they can’t be physically there for you?

This was my question as a child. I wouldn’t say the reasoning for my situation parallels that of Murph’s, but it strikes me how much my reaction does. Murph’s last memory of her father was centered on the anger she felt toward him, and these feelings endured into adulthood.

This is probably something I’m pulling from a psychology class I’ve taken at some point, but memories feel more tied to emotions than they are to actual events. The one thing I am certain of is that art means different things to different people because we’ve all had different experiences. I’m curious about how things would be different if I were a parent rather than a child at the time I first watched the film.

I’ve never considered “Interstellar” profound for its plot. For one thing, it’s a bit too esoteric for my understanding. I don’t have much of a knack for physics. The plot holes are also glaring given the complexity of its synopsis.

But I don’t think this demerits the heart and brilliance of this film; I praise the movie more so for its delivery — the way it elicits specific emotions and navigates relationships.

I discovered this film around the time when I first caught on to the link between love and time. I spent all of high school in love with a friend who wasn’t right for me. Whether or not they felt the same way is something that matters less and less each day — another attribute of time. But when I think back to that person, I can only remember her the way I loved her. This is the power of love, and “Interstellar” captures it well. At the movie’s core is a love story between a parent and a child. Cooper spends days on an exhibition that ages him beyond his comprehension, but he does it out of love and emerges out of it still in love with his children.

Murph is frustrated with her father throughout the duration of the film, but it’s also out of love and the way her 10-year-old self understood his departure. Despite the time and turbulence, the one constant of “Interstellar” is love and its extensions across different experiences. As my understanding of love changes more and more with age, I find that I can at least keep constant the way I felt in that moment of certain experience.

I discovered this film around the time when I first caught on to the link between love and time. I spent all of high school in love with a friend who wasn’t right for me.

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Thursday, March 19, 2020 — 6B

DAILY STYLE COLUMN

B-SIDE: COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Velveteen Dreams: On heaven and hell, part three SAM KREMKE

Daily Style Columnist

I split this column into three parts because I didn’t know how to write this last installment. The Daily Arts generously allows for the involvement of personal narratives as long as they surround an event, moment in culture at large or a work of art. While wrapping the personal around something that can qualify as topical can mean the difference between a form of journalistic content that can be published in a school newspaper and creative non-fiction that must be made available for public consumption by other means, the core of what I’m getting at is deeply personal. I see no other way to move forward than to make that clear from the get go.

Things that are constructed so that they are diametrically opposed to one another, like God and the Devil, create a valley between two extremes that we all supposedly occupy. Their respective hierarchies serve as a degreed apparatus through which we can hold ourselves and others accountable. That becomes problematic, however, when normative functions create a “winning team” in that valley located closer to the desirable pole than others. Without even beginning to address how sin, laws and ailments are defined in such a way that favors the “normal” and quite literally damns those that fall outside of that window, simply existing outside of it in any capacity can foster a lot of negative feelings about oneself. And the thing about those normative functions, especially in an economic system that’s predicated on fear, is that they will continue to multiply (and generate revenue) until they can’t be supported anymore.

This isn’t meant to be an after-school special surrounding the thinning out of the ruling class and consolidation of power, nor is it about how none of us are perfect and we all have at least that in common. In fact, most of the time we aren’t interested in what we have in common, even if we have more in common than not. Human nature, probably out of some vestige of natural selection, is all about differentiation. What’s valued as “normal” is what’s valued as powerful in almost every ideological framework.

“Normal” isn’t a station that encompasses the majority, it is a collection of paragons that constantly move along value lines that serve those in power.

The closer we are in proximity to that power, in our appearances, through our actions, choices and identities, chosen or otherwise, the more likely we are to support the systems that uphold how we currently define it. In working against it, the individual becomes increasingly aware of the things that give them power and the things that take it away, like a Machiavellian push and pull taking place between things that may or may not be within our control. As we are exposed to those dividing lines, what we do with our power and our agency to act in relation to it becomes an increasingly severe individual burden.

I remember looking out of my window one night and seeing a pair of red tail lights. The presence of a black, demiluxury SUV next to a neon-lit sign was innocuous enough, but the emptiness of the Ann Arbor streets at 3 a.m. lent a

paranoid air that infiltrated my thoughts like a cancer. Earlier that day while running an errand, I had hidden an orchid mesh bodysuit under an oversized blazer.

What felt liberating in my apartment, what would have been a proud expression at the drag show I planned to attend later, was squandered while walking in public. Even as it was protected by the conservative, woolen barrier between signifier and signified that I clung to like all hell. I remember feeling my skin rub against it as I walked, an uncomfortable reminder that seeking medical help for my depression had resulted in a weight gain. So much of what I hope for revolves around being a light for others, not necessarily to follow but to be able to look at and smile.

Yet, the standards I hold myself to in order to be that liberatory force are the same ones that hold down so many. I can wear lip gloss and have a “walk” as long as I can also feel my ribs. I can engage with genuine interests of mine that are used to paint my community with a broad brush as long as my voice remains low. I can fight to the nail for my mental health and live to talk about it, but I won’t be able to do what I feel a call to do until I free myself of those chains. I may have internalized such bargains as a way of remaining safe, as a way of being able to move through the world, but the only person standing in the way at this point in my life is myself.

Silly as it may sound, it’s taken a seismic cognitive shift to understand that there are no silent vehicles watching me in the dead of night, waiting to ensnare me with their malevolent aura. There are no devils or demons lurking around the corner.

There’s only me, and the beliefs about myself that I have to undo in order to truly be free.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve felt that I carry a curse with me. I’m lucky to know where that feeling comes from now, but it took me a long time to get to this point. I’ve always reviewed each and every thing that I do with a fine-toothed comb, all with the hopes of wanting to be good, to use my privileges in a productive way and to wear my queerness with pride so as to inspire others. What I didn’t realize until recently is that I wasn’t bringing my happiness into the equation. The opportunity cost, for me, of reviewing myself in the way that I have been is my mental well-being. All of those little things I would look at, the sociopolitical ramifications of every word, every nonverbal gesture, every expression, every conscious and unconscious action, were not being used to productive ends. The relentless self-policing that I have undergone (and still face) is not something that helps me achieve this goal of leveraging my likeness for the common good.

It doesn’t help me bring light to others in the smallest of interactions. It is a hindrance. The internal manifestation of the evil I so desperately want to renounce, to work against, rears its devilish head through this censorship of self. I say this not in defense of the kind of blissful ignorance that only exists in contexts of privilege.

I am fully for asking tough questions, for doing work to unpack whatever bag of bullshit one carries around with them as a result of exalting normalcy. What I will no longer tolerate is allowing self-criticism to take the reins entirely. I will no longer allow each and every breath to carry the weight of heaven and hell.

ALEC COHEN/DAILY

Timely seasonality clashes with an untimely pandemic BRENDON CHO

Daily Food Columnist

On Monday, Mar. 16, Governor Whitmer issued an executive order closing all Michigan restaurants and bars to slow the spread of the coronavirus — an unfortunate consequence of the pandemic for what would otherwise have been an exciting new time for the Ann Arbor food scene.

Bløm Meadworks, a meadery centered around downtown Ann Arbor, is among the businesses that are being forced to reduce or shut down their operations due to the pandemic. However, the true shame is that Bløm, like many other restaurants, is unable to optimally serve products tailored to the frosty harbingers of the spring season. Bløm, more so than other bars and restaurants, falls under the fickle whims of time’s passage.

Should they fail to capture the fleeting presences of new produce that bloom and wither within a span of weeks, Bløm could potentially brew an incomplete narrative of the year’s capricious seasons.

Mead is an alcohol fermented from honey that can range in flavor from the piss-poor and overly-sweetened drinks at a renaissance fair to a well-balanced, fruitforward melomel such as Schramm’s that shames all other wines in its wake. While Schramm’s nearly exclusively specializes in a rich-bodied drink somewhat similar to the alcohol content of wine, Bløm specializes in “sessionable” meads (drinks to be consumed at a leisurely pace in large quantities) more akin to the alcohol content of a dry sour ale.

Like Schramm’s, Bløm frequently features melomels — though by no means does Bløm specialize in them. In spite of that, Bløm’s greatest hits lie within the limited batches of brewed melomels that coincide with the season. A cherry-lemon mead released during late summer 2019 would screech with fruity acidity were it not tamed by the hints of sweet floral honey — exactly the sort of grown-up lemonade that you’ve always dreamed of drinking. The black currant mead, which was available within the late summer to early fall of 2019, emphasized the somewhat spicy and tart currant berries — a departure from a sweetened spice profile that one might find at a meadery such as Schramm’s.

Though seasonality throughout the winter may seem as if it would empty out Bløm’s selections of mead, Bløm compensates through an increased focus of ciders — and a Christmas-themed mead. For instance, though the apricots utilized in the Hopricot Cider would normally provide a sweet, autumnal tone, the inclusion of hops provides an astringency that helps you fight back from

the chills of early winter — without any of the bitterness normally attached to a hop. As a follow-up, the Christmas mead’s spicy ginger overtones melds with sour cranberries — a melding that you suspect would be jarring were it not for the background notes of sweet honey binding the two together. Bløm, it seems, finds its style of mead by utilizing honey as a negotiator instead of the main event.

But perhaps the greatest mainstay of Bløm’s selection lies not with their meads or ciders, but with their switchel soda — a soda primarily consumed by American farmers in the 1800s. This drink is an anomaly — not only because of the lack of alcohol, but also because of what it highlights. The interplay between the honey and fruit vinegar is Bløm’s homage to the sweet and floral qualities of honey. While Bløm may use honey as the great negotiator in many of their sessionable meads, the soda takes the opposite stance in showcasing honey as a star player. Honey, you find, is not afraid to shine when it doesn’t have other ingredients nearby that need disciplining.

But with Governor Whitmer’s orders to shut down all restaurants and bars, it would be impossible to continue to drink Bløm’s carefully curated drinks on tap. As somewhat of a consolation, Bløm offers a few of their taps from their previous seasons across grocery stores and liquor stores such as Plum Market, Blue Front or Whole Foods.

Most notably you’d find cans of a somewhat mediocre Blueberry Maple mead and its much tarter but exciting cousin: the Pear Ginger cider. Both may be throwbacks to the summer and fall seasons of 2019, though they provide an exciting sneak peek at what Bløm could offer in the coming bountiful seasons of 2020. In light of this pandemic, however, it’s challenging to watch the new spring season pass as you are unable to enjoy what Bløm might have created.

There are still ways to support your local restaurants and breweries — continuing to buy local food and drinks, providing generous tips to restaurant and delivery staff or when possible buying miscellaneous merchandise of your favorite local businesses. While it is possible to support Bløm Meadworks by purchasing their canned drinks and merchandise, supporting the artisanal, seasonal drinks that they create in small batches may be difficult if you are unable to go to Bløm’s curbside pick-up for a drink.

Hopefully, you are able to support Bløm in their time of need. In the meantime, hope that you can enjoy Bløm’s curated tap by the full force of spring or summer.

Bløm Meadworks is located at 100 S 4th Avenue, Suite 110, Ann Arbor, Michigan.