Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

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and DEREK WOLFE

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4A — Monday, January 26, 2015

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EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Evaluating WSN

H

ave you ever heard a song
that just clicked with you?
Having some involuntary

bodily
response

to
the
chords

or
lyrics,
feel-

ing like you may
have ascended to
some other musi-
cal
realm?
I’m

not talking about
the gagging feel-
ing you might get
when you hear
“CoCo” by O.T.
Genasis, I’m talk-
ing about some-
thing real. For a moment, think
back to a time when a song gave
you goosebumps, brought tears to
your eyes or brought forth the feel-
ing of a rock in your stomach. Band
songs, musical songs and even pop-
ular songs on your iPod can trig-
ger these responses. I talked with
Chelsea Zabel, a senior psychology
major, about some of the songs that
gave her chills.

Two of the songs were from musi-

cals: “Till We Reach That Day” from
“Ragtime” and “One Day More” from
“Les Miserables.” “Ragtime” is about
three families from different eth-
nic and socioeconomic backgrounds
in New York City at the turn of the
20th century, while “Les Miserable”
is a story following an ex-convict as
he tries to do good despite tensions
between the French government and
people in 19th-century France.

For both, the end of Act I is closed

by its respective song, one imme-
diately after a war uprising and the
other after *SPOILER* the death of a

main character. Tensions have risen
in both plots, and both songs are
calls to justice in response to recent
events. Zabel describes the point in
the show when you are “pre-invested
in the storyline,” forming connec-
tions with the plot and the charac-
ters. Each song starts with pain from
a single voice. But strength begins
to grow when it starts building with
other singers.

“It starts when you’re already on

edge, then it just fills out to where
you can’t think about anything else
because there is just so much going
on,” Zabel said. “You’re just inside of
the music.”

The point of a good musical is to

envelop you and transport you to that
time and that scene. Music is there
to bridge the connection between
the audience member and the actors,
portraying not just the plot, but the
emotions as well.

Now think about a time when

you created something amazing.
Whether you built it at MHacks, in
a wood shop with your hands, in
the kitchen or with an instrument,
you were proud, right? You put in
the time, effort and elements that
you knew needed to be a part of the
final product. I immediately think to
“Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral”
by Richard Wagner. A percussionist
in high school, I played timpani for
this song. After months of practice,
I had not thought much about “Elsa”
and let it go (pun intended) with the
other songs to the back of my mind.
But come concert time, performance
ready and played with perfection, the
song immediately caused me tears
and chills. It was beautiful; we had

worked so hard to create such a beau-
tiful piece. Building slowly, the pro-
cessional becomes more robust with
emotion and volume. Even listening
to it as I write this, I am taken back to
that exact concert.

How about popular songs? You may

have heard it a thousand times on the
radio when it was nauseatingly repeat-
ed, or some oldie but goodie when
iTunes was on shuffle. But was there a
time when it meant something differ-
ent? Zabel remembers a time in sixth
grade when the song “The Middle”
came on by Jimmy Eat World. As she
had heard it before, this song spoke
to the (then) insecure, middle-school
Chelsea. Making her cry, she said she
felt relieved because “the song was
telling me ‘… everything was going to
be alright, alright. Doin’ better on your
own, so don’t buy in.’ Oh my gosh, it’s
speaking to me!”

Those days when certain songs

don’t just go from one earbud to the
other, but actually sit in your brain
and make you think and react; those
are the days when you actually hear
the lyrics.

So here’s what you do now. Go to

YouTube and listen to these songs,
think about how you’re feeling while
listening to it. Listen to the songs a
couple times if you have to, see how
your body and mind respond. If you
remember a song that caused some
involuntary response in you, I want
to know! Whether it is a T-Swift song
or some piece you played in middle-
school jazz band, one day it might arise
and spark some reaction inside of you.

— Sara Shamaskin can be

reached at scsham@umich.edu.

Visceral reactions

SARA
SHAMASKIN

I

have an interest in mental health care,
in both definitions of the word “inter-
est.” I find the topic interesting to read

about and discuss, and as a
person suffering from men-
tal illness, it is in my best
interest for these services
to be available, affordable
and transparent. As news
began to trickle out about
Wolverine Support Net-
work, a system of stu-
dent-run
mental
health

support
groups,
my
curiosity

was peaked.

WSN is an initiative of

Central Student Government (something in
which I certainly do not have an interest) and
was one of the major proposals outlined dur-
ing last spring’s student elections. The idea of
student-led support groups came from CSG
President Bobby Dishell, who had seen simi-
lar initiatives played out at high schools and
smaller colleges. WSN launched on Jan. 22,
and soon groups of 10 to 12 students will begin
weekly meetings.

As the program slowly unveiled itself, I was

deeply skeptical. Some students I spoke with
expressed a lack of confidence in these groups,
fearing that the issues faced by marginalized
students would be misunderstood or dis-
missed by their peers. My chief concern was,
and still is, the concept of loosely trained stu-
dents acting as group leaders, especially if this
could result in attention and resources moving
away from professional clinicians.

To further complicate the matter, WSN has

been strongly endorsed by Counseling and
Psychological Services, a University service
with a mixed track record. CAPS has served
thousands of students this year alone, but it’s
also the place that — for me and many others
— told us an initial appointment would be two
weeks away and a follow-up would take anoth-
er two weeks. I’ve had good and bad experi-
ences at CAPS, and have heard the same from
numerous peers. As the vital campus center for
mental health, “half good, half bad” appeared
to me as closer to failure than success.

A discussion with Dr. Todd Sevig, director

of CAPS, helped me begin to see WSN (and
CAPS) in a different light. Sevig, who has
spent 25 years at the University, called the idea
of a peer support network “the best thing since
sliced bread.”

Explaining his feelings, Sevig framed WSN

as a point of entry, perhaps for a student who
will use clinical therapy down the road, or as
the first and only interaction another student
will need to build better coping skills.

“We try to approach ‘mental health, mental

illness’ as really resting on a continuum, where,
really, in some sense of the word or definition,
all 43,000 students could use help and support
around mental health,” Sevig explained. “For
some students, it will be easier to talk to a peer
than one of us as a good first step.”

Sevig made a good point, and I was remind-

ed that my condition and personal preferences
lay on a very different part of this continuum

than most students. As for those awful wait
times, during the Fall 2013 semester, students
waited 10 days on average between coming in
and seeing someone at CAPS. During the Fall
2014 semester, under a new initial appoint-
ment system, student wait times fell to an aver-
age of 3.7 days — and this is with an 18 percent
increase in the number of students coming in
and asking for help.

CSG President Bobby Dishell and WSN

student leader Nick Raja both echoed many
of Sevig’s points, describing peer support
groups as having a lower barrier for students
to get help. This is a lower barrier than going
to CAPS, but also a lower barrier to something
that may be even more difficult for some stu-
dents, like telling their parents.

“It’s an entry point for someone who

didn’t grow up with a therapist in their home
town, and its an entry point for someone who
took a semester off to do inpatient,” Dishell
explained. “For some people, it’ll be a supple-
ment. For other people, it’ll be all they need.”

Dishell also assured me, “We’re not

training therapists.”

Raja, who will be leading a student group

with at least one other leader, spoke similar-
ly, saying, “It’s not therapy, it’s for everyone.”
He further explained that the leader’s role is
to facilitate, not to be a counselor, and that a
large part of WSN leader training was under-
standing how to recommend students for more
comprehensive treatment.

Dishell, though humble about the net-

work’s goals in helping individual students,
has made it no secret that WSN has ambi-
tious aims, saying, “In five years, hopefully
less, it’ll just be something that you do. It’ll be
engrained in the culture.”

Raja, who wrote an op-ed earlier this

fall promoting WSN, mentioned the idea of
“changing campus culture,” a promise that
seems to be made by countless student groups
every semester.

I discussed with Sevig how lately, cam-

pus culture has been changing in the


wrong direction.

“Every year, it seems, that the pressure to be

the Leaders and the Best has gotten higher and
higher and higher — and that has some conse-
quences,” Sevig said.

One of the biggest consequences, Sevig

explained, is “a sense of ‘I can’t fail; I can’t
even do average work.’ ”

On a campus built with the purpose of educa-

tion, students are instead faced with a perfec-
tionist mentality that stifles learning and fuels
anxiety. This is a culture that all of us are famil-
iar with, and one that doesn’t appear to be going
away anytime soon.

For now, I’ll cling to some of my skepticism

about WSN, at least in the big picture. However,
student leaders backing WSN are going in the
right direction, as is CAPS under Sevig’s lead-
ership. Hopefully some of this work really will
“change campus culture” — in that, I would


certainly find quite a high level of interest.

— James Brennan can be reached

at jmbthree@umich.edu.

The cycle

JAMES
BRENNAN

A

t the request of those interviewed, all
identities in this piece have been writ-
ten with pseudonyms.

Emit — a white man in his

middle 30s — has been living
on the streets in Ann Arbor
since his release from a county
prison, where he served a sev-
en-year stint for an armed rob-
bery conviction. He received
parole and was expected upon
his release to rejoin a society of
which he had never truly been


a member.

“They told me I could go

to therapy,” Emit said of the
options made available to him
by the county. “They did give me a place. But (the
transition) wasn’t easy.”

Emit was set up in an apartment and was eligi-

ble to become employed through a prisoner reen-
try program. For Emit, however, it didn’t feel like
a new start, but rather a mere change of scenery.

Emit was outfitted with an electronic tether,

confined to travel only between his apartment
and his workplace. Traveling outside of these
bounds would have been a violation of his
parole and would have landed him back in pris-
on. After a period of time — alone day after day
without friends or family in the state — Emit
felt as if he had never left his prison cell.

“You know what they say: if you put a rat in a

cage, he drives himself insane,” he said.

The emotional stress and the depression that

festered with each passing day of his release
started to get to Emit, especially once he began
to realize that the wages he had been earning at

his entry-level job weren’t even enough to cover
rent for the apartment he had been given.

When Emit tried appealing to his land-

lord, he was told that he would be evicted if
he couldn’t make the rent payments on time.
And as a felon with “a real jacked-up criminal
record,” even prior to his most recent felony
incarceration, the prospect of an additional job
was bleak; Emit found himself in a downward
cycle that he didn’t know how to break. Accord-
ing to research done by the Population Studies
Center, this is a struggle typical for parolees.

“I quit the job, acting irrational. All of a sud-

den, I had no job, no place. So what am I gonna
do?” Emit recalled asking himself.

His solution: a return to the transient life on

the streets he had lived since leaving his home-
town in Maine as a teen.

Not able to leave the state as a condition of

his parole, Emit chose to settle in amongst the
homeless population in Ann Arbor. According
to a 2013 census, 3,000 to 4,000 individuals are
living without homes in Washtenaw County, a
number which doubled in the years between
2011 and 2013.

Emit — shortly after quitting his job — joined

their ranks. After doing so, he noticed a huge
difference between his reality on the streets in
Ann Arbor and his experiences with homeless-
ness in other cities across the nation; the com-
munity in Ann Arbor — both those with and
without homes — was something unique.

In comparison to neighboring Ypsilanti — a

city with a median household income almost
$20,000 lower than that of Ann Arbor, accord-
ing to statistics from 2012 — Emit said he’s able
to get more sympathy from both passersby and

AUSTIN
DAVIS

police in Ann Arbor. Relative to other
cities, he’s treated with some norma-
tive level of respect here.

“It’s peaceful … although there’s a

ton of competition, you can still get
by,” he said.

He also noticed solidarity amongst

other members of the homeless popu-
lation in Ann Arbor, a community that
congregates in designated, clandestine
spots around the city center. They help
each other out with places to find food
and shelter. “Anything you need,” Emit
said, “someone will tell you where it’s
at usually.”

I didn’t want to seem patronizing,

like I was just a curious kid coming
up and asking his life story at no per-
sonal benefit to him. So I bought him
a cup of coffee and kicked it with him
for a bit longer. He joked with me
at times, describing his preference
for the bizarre — his preference for


unrestrained freedom.

“ ‘Bizarre’ is one of the excitements

of life; it’s like a way to experience life.
It keeps things interesting. It’s the
randomness. It’s the new experiences.
You can find everything these days,
but still random bullshit happens. It’s
an adventure.”

I considered that, and had to admit

that I agreed; spontaneity, random-
ness and serendipity are nouns I’d like
to use to describe my life as well.

But as my hands began to grow

numb from dictating our conversation,
I realized that perhaps this was a jus-
tification for Emit, a way to lighten his
mental burden by assuring himself that
there are some redeeming aspects to his
situation. The bags underneath his eyes,
and his hands, calloused and dirty from
exposure, contradicted this sentiment.

So too did his future goals.
“It’s time to do something and get

going,” Emit told me. “Get a job, a
place, community college, a better job
and civilization.”

The concept of ‘civilization’ came

up frequently during our conversa-
tion. After a while it dawned on me:
despite the humor, intelligence and
civility with which I’d come to know
Emit over the course of our conver-
sation, he classified himself as one
outside of society.

And really, he is. But not for want

of reentry.

Emit had to leave to catch a bus to

meet his parole officer. I left our con-
versation wondering if employers in
this city — whose community Emit
felt treated him with respect — would
respect a parolee enough to give him
another shot.

— Austin Davis can be reached

at austchan@umich.edu.

TRAVON JEFFERSON| MICHIGAN IN COLOR

What’s up? Ya’ll good? Yes my dear

reader, this is an educational article
despite the few sentences you will
catch of a different dialect: Black
English Vernacular (BEV) to be
exact. I apologize for any headaches
or bottomless confusion I may cause
in advance to any “Standard English”
or “Strict Grammar” readers that
may stumble across this article. Don’t
let the confusion of this dialect deter
you, let it motivate you to learn it and
become “articulate.” You may come
across words that looked misspelled
but certainly, in BEV, these words
are spelled phonetically correct. For
instance the word “mouth,” phoneti-
cally speaking, BEV speakers replace
the Θ sound, which pronounces the
“th” sound in “mouth” and instead
use “f” so the word will actually
be spelled “mouf” that’s basic BEV
phonology 101 for ya’. All the con-
tractions, the twangish vocabulary
words that I type up, or any other
complex Black English grammar that
I may lose the reader in, my bad. So, if
you can tolerate my unbearable black
syntax, stick around and you just may
learn something!

Growing up in a heavily African

American/Black American populated
area, I got the dialect I’m so proud
to call my own. My BEV is so deeply
rooted inside my heart that it’s clear
where I come from the moment I
speak. Detroit, Michigan, raised on
the east side to be exact. All my life, I
was corrected for the way I talked. I
had to be extremely careful, to make
sure I pronounce every word with
clarity and don’t I dare incorporate
those BEV grammar rules or gov-
erning syntax. Of course, I only had
to monitor my speaking in school,
because I wanna sound intelligent
and I want the teacher to see that I am
intelligent. My whole thing is, do I not


sound intelligent?

Just because I speak with this

minority dialect, does that really make

me stupid? Nah I ain’t stupid, clearly
the President Barack Obama has the
same vernacular I do. If anything, my
BEV is what’s up because it shows that
I’m multi-dialectical. Yep, I can switch
between speaking Black, and then
switch to speaking what people call
“Standard English.”

So my next question, my dear

audience, do you know anybody that
speaks with a BEV dialect? Were they
speaking clear English but you just
couldn’t grasp why, for some reason,
they decided to put that habitual “be”
in the place of an adverb such as usu-
ally? Did I lose you? Don’t worry, I
have examples for days: Have you ever
heard someone say, “She be eating a
lot?” Or, for more of a direct college
experience, “He be studying?” Do you
be confused? I hope so. ‘Cause, now
that you’re confused, I can pull you
out of that confusion pit and teach you
a thing or two. I can teach you some-
thing that linguists have been trying to
educate people on for years.

Black English Vernacular is not

stupid, it’s not a dysfunctional piece
of English, and it’s a dialect that has
developed a complex system of rules
and syntax. Seriously, can you really
say something is dumb or not right
when it has a full-blown system,
which if not followed carefully will
make the speaker sound outright
wrong and garner the confused looks
of every natural BEV speaker? For
instance, if a non-BEV speaker tries
to use the habitual “be,” they would
probably say something such as, “He is
studying,” which makes no sense BEV
syntax-wise. In Standard English and
non-BEV, speakers will use the verb
“to be” correctly, but BEV natives have
a different way of saying it. For quick
and easy BEV speakers, we use that
good ol’ BEV syntax and drop that “to
be” verb “is” and turn that into a habit-
ual “be” and you have “he be study-
ing.” The beauty that comes with the
habitual “be” is that it does not have

no specific time frame. Standard Eng-
lish speakers would hear “Travon be
studying,” and think that I’m off some-
where studying at that very moment.
According to BEV natives I could be
studying now, later, or sometime last
week, just know I be studying.

My dear readers, BEV is a great dia-

lect where you must possess the cor-
rect rules to speak it, but you need to
have that slur/paused way of speaking,
the nice little twang that compliments
it. Ms. Jamila Lyiscott explained a per-
fect rule in her TED Talk “3 ways to
speak English” (haven’t heard of her?
Please educate yourself now) when she
said her mother mocked BEV saying,
“Y’all be madd going to the store” and
Ms. Lyiscot instantly corrected her in
response saying, “never does madd
go before a present participle.” This
is in fact true. Now, you’re thinking
that mad is an emotion, actually mad
turned into an adverb that modifies
adjectives or verbs, for example “that
was mad cool yo.” Don’t worry my
dear readers, I won’t delve deep into
the various vocabulary terms and the
way how their definitions switch in
accordance to the syntax of BEV.

My point is, however, next time

you see that friend/classmate/person
speaking with a twang and mixing
up that “Standard English” syntax
and turning it into another perfect
English dialect known as BEV, don’t
downplay their intelligence. PLEASE
don’t ask them to steady repeat them-
selves, and whatever you do, don’t try
and imitate the way they mouf’s form
and shape them words because trust
and believe, if you don’t sound right
you will get the straightest, coldest
and blankest stare of your life. Cause
guess what, BEV gotta complex sys-
tem of syntax, that to speak it prop-
erly and be able to code-switch into
“Standard English” makes you what
me and Jamila like to call articulate.

Travon Jefferson is an LSA junior.

Speakin’ Black ain’t easy