4A - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 4A - Wednesday, March 26, 2014 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@niichigandaily.com MEGAN MCDONALD PETER SHAHIN and DANIEL WANG KATIE BURKE EDITOR IN CHIEF EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS MANAGING EDITOR Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. Vote FORUM The Michigan Daily editorial board endorses Manes and Abraham entral Student Government's main purpose is to represent the student body, to gauge the needs of University students and work to implement beneficial changes. While current CSG leadership has been effective in bringing about change - such as working to implement a new football seating policy - its efforts have not encompassed the entirety of campus. The next leaders of CSG should strive to fairly incorporate traditionally unheard voices in student government in order to better represent all students at the University. Except for one party, most of the CSG presidential and vice presidential candidates are running on a platform that is either too vague or overly narrow to the point of being exclusionary. The Michigan Daily's editorial board is endorsing FORUM candidates Carly Manes and Pavitra Abraham for CSG president and vice president because of their inclusive vision and their plan to empower students. Weight of thaw . - While Make Michigan candidates have solid experience in student government, their plans for the future do not fully address current campus concerns. Presidential candidate Bobby Dishell, a Public Policy junior, is currently serving as CSG vice president and vice presidential candidate Meagan Shokar, an LSA sophomore, is the CSG speaker of the assembly. Their proposed initiatives for next year focus primarily on improving the student experience through campus technology - namely the Michigan smartphone app - and mental health. While mental health is an issue that should be addressed by student government - and something FORUM should emphasize - there are other areas of campus life that deserve attention as well. Specifically, campus diversity, as proven by the #BBUM movement, is an issue the future student government should be concerned with. Bringing together the large campus community and ensuring every voice is heard should also be a major focus. Make Michigan's past experience in' student government may prove valuable, but its lack of a comprehensive vision is problematic. Independent candidate Aristide Coumarbatch, an LSA senior, is running under the premise of setting a good example for other students, showing the importance of creating equality and implementing diversity. Coumarbatch decided to forgo the support of a party to demonstrate to students that running for CSG president is achievable by everyone. Having no affiliation with a previous party or experience as a representative, Coumarbatch is completely new to CSG. Though he stresses a "fight for change" and a need to "increase diversity," Coumarbatch doesn't offer any specific direction toward execution of these goals. With a lack of objective and no previous experience with the inner workings of the CSG, we're uncertain as to what Coumarbatch would be able to successfully accomplish. From the Defend Affirmative Action Party, LSA sophomore Mical Holt and LSA freshman Taylor Jones are running for CSG president and vice president. The party offers a strong vision for improving the climate around social justice on campus and should be commended for its initiative in tackling one of the University's most pressingissues. Whichever partyiselected should strive to increase underrepresented minority enrollment and serve as advocates for affirmative action should the opportunity arise. Especially in light of recent campus events, the goals of DAAP deserve recognition from CSG. However, as a single-issue party, DAAP's focus is too narrow to fully serve the needs of the entire student body. Capitalizing on the noticeable lack of student engagement with CSG, the Party Party has established itself as a new alternative. Unfortunately, the Party Party has no tangible initiatives to support its unique approach. The party has said that expressing specific goals contradicts the notion that the student body should direct CSG action. While this philosophy is admirable, the Party Party's lack of concrete goals is concerning and begs the question of what exactly LSA junior Ryan Hayes and Business junior Brennan Woods - the party's presidential and vice presidential candidates - would do if elected. Their call for increased attention to student engagement is certainly warranted, but CSG needs a leader with a concrete vision to improve the school. FORUM presidential candidate Carly Manes is a Public Policy junior who has held leadership positions in multiple student organizations on campus and has served on LSA Student Government as a freshman and sophomore. Vice presidential candidate Pavitra Abraham is also in her junior year in LSA and is experienced in working as a community organizer on campus. FORUM's goal of creating a student position on the University's Board of Regents is indicative of the party's main focus of improving student representation. FORUM has prioritized students' voices by pushing an outreach agenda to bring campus perspectives together. In addition to an idealistic vision, Manes and Abraham have specific proposals aimed at improving student life. A bus route to local grocery stores and a SafeRide app to ensure student safety will benefit all of campus. While such an ambitious agenda may seem overwhelming, FORUM's plan to empower passionate students in specific fields is a smart and inclusive strategy. This year, The Michigan Daily's editorial board endorses FORUM candidates CARLY MANES and PAVITRA ABRAHAM for CSG president and vice president. This winter's beginning was familiar. Snow fell - first in coveted flurries, and then as inescapable heaps. My aloe plant turned leathery on my windowsill. My housemates and I muddied our kitchen floor with sloppybooctracks./ Canada geese, EMILY who always seem PITTINOS to stick around PTTINS long after they logically should, probed the frozenground for morsels each day before tucking their faces under their wings at night. As my senior year plodded along, the consistently negative temperatures made my every outdoor movement robotic and hasty. My friends and I would help each other across glinting layers of sidewalk ice, laughing in disbelief as we slipped and gripped each other's arms. We became both quick-footed and cautious, learning to exploit areas with the most traction - the blotches of new-fallen snow, the places where slush had formed around footprints and then refrozen. Our bodies ached from struggling with gravity - spines twisted after retracting missteps, hips wrenched from halting mid-fall - and we bitched over beers about kinks in our necks like the arthritic members of a Red HatSociety.We cobbledtogether poetry portfolios, and wrote lengthy theses about security checkpoints and feminist anarchy, but even our most vibrant conversations always turned back to the snow. Time compounded, as it tends to do - days diffusing into weeks and then into months. Months of lungs lined with stubborn phlegm; months of fingers fumbling withkeys in the cold; months of smug couples strolling around campus with their hands tucked sweetly in each other's parkapockets. Meanwhile,loneliness slowed my blood flow; warmth barely worked through me, like a weak current trickling over a frozen river, turning my skin gray and chilly to the touch. Any time I left the house, I keptmyhead down to protect myraw cheeks from the wind; I didn'tlook at the sky all winter. Some moments inspired the exaggerations I'll feed my children when they complain about having to don their coats on Halloween. I'll mention the most frigid night of the year, when my housemates and I stayed up singing and sucking down pulls of whiskey, afraid the heat would silently fail and give us over to hypothermia as we slept. I'll tell them about how my parents feared their roof would collapse under the weight of its ice blanket, and in the mornings, in that moment between dream and waking, I imagined my childhood home as a mound of white rubble, the family dog barking and digging desperately through the snow. But, despite all doubts, this morning I looked out my window to find March waiting for me - as she always does at this time of year - with the gift of thaw in her hands. The sidewalk ice is receding to reveal lost treasures - car keys, lipstick tubes, pushpins, dropped tampons, hubcaps, that lone and forsaken mitten. The geese survived. My parents' roof isstill intact. But as its shingles reemerge, and the mountains of plowed snow on the Diag shrink to nothing, all of that weight remains. Though I'm no longer skidding down these streets, bent and VIRGINIAEASTHOPE/Daly braced for the cold, my shoulders don't seem any looser or lighter. While I should be rejoicing - cartwheeling across the prickly grass and inhaling a little sunshine - I actually feel heavier than I did in the midst of the Polar Vortex. The weight of ice has been replaced by the reality of spring, the reality that this is my last month of living my current life. The monot- ony that was encouraged by this urban tundra - circuits between class, work, bar, sleep, class, work, bar, sleep - seduced me into this city's collective hibernation, and tricked me into thinking time had slowed. But now that my internal calendar is thawing out with the rest of our campus, it feels like I've overslept for months and missed every class, every deadline, every party, every interview, every Sun- day brunch. of course, this isn't a new discovery; all students fear the end of school, and a little panic nourishes both ambition and the soul. However, wisdom and reason don't seem totake the edge off of this trepidation, or make me any more sure-footed as I polish off the year. Like every senior class before us, we face a future full of winters. Like every class before us, we will slip before catching ourselves on a good friend's shoulder. Eventually, we will land firmly on the ground, though whether we make contact with our feet or asses first depends entirely on the way we fall. Either way, it will hurt - our bodies will ache along with-our hearts. But our lives are changing as quickly as ice can melt out of existence, and we have to brace ourselves for the sudden heat of it all. - Enily Pittinos can be reached at pittinos()umich.edu. LAUREN GROSSMANN I Stop hating and try a little empathy Everyone carries their own problems on their back and tries to find some blame for things beyond their control. This past week, we saw tensions rise at the University over an issue about disinvesting fromthe State of Israel, and there has been much controversy over the result. I will be the first to admit Iam biased in this issue. I amJewishandpro-Israel.However, I do not think resolutions like this belong in the hands of our student government. Its job is to enhance the life of students on campus and it should not be forced to play a role in a highly polarizing issue that divides members of the campus. People have been arguing that members of Central Student Government have been "cowards" because they ended the debate on the issue by tabling the motion to end the bill indefinitely. However, not all members of CSG are personally invested in the issue and may not know enough about either side to make a justified stance on the issue. Tabling the motion might not have been the right decision, but it was the best given the options. This resolution would've separated people on campus. Yesterday, I was talking to someone about the issue and she feared there might have been a race issue that the campus is ignoring. She asked me, "How does a white privileged girl like yourself know about the shame that the minority students feel on campus?" My answer: I don't. I personally cannot know what it was like to grow up as a racial minority in white America. But, I am Jewish and I've been a victim of anti- Semitism. I've witnessed people putting swastikas at a high school in my hometown, I've been called Christ-killer, I've been told I am going to hell for just being Jewish, and that hurt. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors; my grandfather survived Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Anyone that is a minority faces some kind of stigma that some members of society won't accept. I am not asking for sympathy, everyone has their own problems. We should look past our own problems and try to find common ground among our social groups. We are all students at this University who come from all backgrounds. We come together to make this campus a diverse and enriching atmosphere. We should embrace those differences and find things that make us the same. People reading this might call me a racist just because of my stance on the issue. Iam willing to sit and talk in an open forum. I am willing to talk and listen - you might find out we have more in common than we realize. People need to stop blaming others for actions that are beyond their control. It hinders cooperation and growth. It divides us. Blaming CSG is not goingto solve the issue,.it's just going to raise tensions further. Lauren Grossmann is an LSA junior. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Barry Belmont, Edvinas Berzanskis, Nivedita Karki, Jacob Karafa, Jordyn Kay, Aarica Marsh, Megan McDonald, Victoria Noble, Michael Schramm, Matthew Seligman, Paul Sherman, Allison Raeck, Linh Vu, Daniel Wang, Derek Wolfe YAZAN KHERALLAH N We will not be silent The following narrative is the and stripped their childhood away a year and doesn't know when she speech I was planning to give at the from them. I asked myself: What will see him again. Central Student Government meeting could children ever do to deserve And when I think of violence on Tuesday had the legislators not growing up under the circumstances committed by the Israeli military, I decided to shut down discussion. We of a violent military occupation? I think of Mustafa Tamimi, who died will not be silent. want all of you to ask yourselves the after having half his face blown off by Iwas blessed withtheopportunity same question. a tear gas canister shot into his face to spend my last summer in the West Because when I think of the by IDF soldiers. I went to his village, Bank helping organize a summer occupation's system of racial Nabi Saleh, and participated in one of camp for children of the Dheisheh segregation and how Palestinians the weekly peaceful demonstrations refugee camp in Bethlehem. Living must go through checkpoints to they hold in protest of a nearby under occupation, Palestinian get from place to place, I think of settlement taking their water source. children are forced to survive in Tasneem. Just 10-years-old, she I met his friends. How traumatizing extremely severe circumstances. had a rheumatism that required a the sight ofthis severed jaw must have The motivation for the summer medical operation that could only be been for the children who grew up camp was to provide a semblance of performed in East Jerusalem - land with him. normalcy, a safe space in which they that is internationally recognized to The fact of the matter is, unlike can learn, play and grow - away be part of the Palestinian territories. what Newt Gingrich would have from their harsh environment, if Because of checkpoints, she wasn't you believe, Palestinians are not an that's even possible. allowed to cross into East Jerusalem invented people and neither are the During my time in the West Bank, and get the medical care she needs. realities we are telling you of. The I witnessed the occupation's brutal If she doesn't, she'll never be able to occupation has real consequences, policies. I saw the checkpoints, walk properly again. on real people, with real lives. And the segregated bus systems, the When I think of administrative our University's investments have settlements, and Israeli soldiers' detention, and the way Palestinians real consequences. terrorization of Palestinian towns are funneled into prisons en masse So when we talk to you about and villages. I heard horrible stories without charge, without visitation military blockades, checkpoints and of innocent family members killed rights, and without due process, I separation walls, I want you to think and of family members that were think of Israa'. When I asked the of Palestinian children. I want you to imprisoned, tortured and taken away. class to draw a picture of something think ofIsraa' and how she may never The entire time, I thought of how that made them happy, she drew see her brother again. And of Tas- this impacted the kids I worked and her family eating dinner together. neem, who may never walk properly played with daily. I thought of how She said it was the first dinner her again. And I want you to ask your- those children were born into a world family will have after her brother selves: What did they do to deserve that has rejected them and ignored is released from prison. Because the way the world has treated them? their suffering - a world that has of administrative detention, Israa' treated them with hate and racism hasn't seen her older brother in over Yazan Kherallah isvan LSA senior. I am upset. I am disappointed. But more so, I am very proud of what we've accomplished." -LSA senior Suha Najjar said in response to CSG's decision to vote down the proposed UM Divest resolution by SAFE. Najjar was one of the original authors.