Opinion JENNIFER CALFAS EDITOR IN CHIEF AARICA MARSH and DEREK WOLFE EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS LEV FACHER MANAGING EDITOR 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 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. The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4 — Friday, January 30, 2015 T his past week, my friends and I saw the movie “Selma” (now in theaters near you!). The movie is based on the marches for voting rights during the peak of the Civil Rights Move- ment of the 1960s. These marches, which spanned from Selma to Montgom- ery, Alabama, were led by the Southern Chris- tian Leadership Conference and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and ultimately encouraged the passing of the Vot- ing Rights Act of 1965. The movie is directed by Ava DuVernay, the first Black female direc- tor to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award and the first Black woman to win the Best Director Prize at Sundance Film Festival. While the original script was written by Paul Webb, a British white man, a woman of color was wise- ly chosen to direct the film. “Selma” is a beautiful film with a triumphant mes- sage: When we organize and unite in nonviolent protest, we can create a significant difference in this country. We can work against racial injustice and pre- vail with new civil rights, such as the Voting Rights Act. Yet with some basic knowledge of Ameri- can current events, there is also a deeper, more jarring message coded throughout the film: Selma is now. I am a white female. I am an ally of the movement and cannot claim these struggles as my own. But the movement for justice among all races — that is everyone’s political issue. Silence is violence, and we must learn from the evolution of movements that have come before us. I write this article because “Selma” reminded me that we have not come this far just to historicize the Civil Rights Movement while we munch on popcorn and slurp Coca-Cola (not that popcorn and Coke are bad ideas). Rather, we must use it as fuel to continue our (painfully) slow but steady evolution towards equality. As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but relate so many of the scenes to modern-day battles in the fight for equality. Even the most- brutal of scenes in “Selma” seemed to trig- ger the thought of some modern struggle. As protestors in the movie were gassed, beaten, whipped and just generally violently attacked by police officers on the road to Montgom- ery, who wasn’t thinking of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York and all of the people of color publicized in the papers recently that have been attacked or killed by law enforcement officers? Peaceful protests against police brutality in Berkeley, Califor- nia were met with even more police brutality. A man who honked his horn at police officers blocking his driveway was beaten and tased. The current criminal jus- tice system has been called the new Jim Crow. It has been compared in many logical ways to the systemic oppression of slavery. The “war against drugs” has sent millions into the com- plex, most of them people of color. We continue desper- ate efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools are legally segre- gating due to income dis- parities and the increasing wealth gap. We are still fighting our way from Selma to Montgomery. We are still fighting for the safety of Black children on the street. We speak of the nuances of white privilege and the invisible backpack, and this is all very important and true. But there is also the matter of the visible anvil resting heavily on everyone’s back, one that forces us to deal with matters of life and death, slavery and freedom, imprisonment and justice. We have come a long way, and that should not be denied or forgotten. But many of our institutional forms of oppression have sim- ply taken another form. The fight is not over, and while we ponder the real ingre- dients in the artificially buttered popcorn of our dark movie theater, we must also ponder the “Selma” of today. Selma is now. —Maris Harmon can be reached at marhar@umich.edu. Selma is now L ast week brought perhaps the holiest day to our cam- pus, a day of reverence and devotion for the furry friends that scamper around us. Yes, Squirrel Appre- ciation Day had arrived, and for the one place in the world where the usual nuisances are daily acquain- tances, this day was a reminder of just how weird campus really is sometimes. It was a day celebrated on the Uni- versity’s official Instagram with a post by two people in squirrel masks hilariously giving random hugs and high fives to students on the Diag, courtesy of the brilliant people behind @umich_squirrels. With an official mascot no longer existing in the wild in our own state, it seems we have turned to some other furred quadrupedal creature to suit our needs. We’ve replaced one of the most ferocious creatures in the wild — the wolverine — with another whose big- gest claim to fame is bringing down the NASDAQ Stock Market twice by being electrocuted from running on power lines. Then not only do we make enough of a spectacle about squirrels that one of our librarians has taken 11,000 pic- tures of them, but we create an official school club dedicated to feeding them. I had tenuous relationships with squirrels before coming to college. They went to terrorizing lengths to gain entrance in the trash cans in our garage, to the point where we had to trap them in our own yard and release them at a park. I once hit too many wif- fle balls over the fence when I was a kid, and knowing I would get grounded, I decided to blame it on squirrels steal- ing all the balls instead. Another time, one got trapped in our garage while we were gone on vacation and over a few days went full X-Men Wolverine and clawed a full two inches through brick trying to get out. Perhaps the strangest was the day I got home from school and was met face to face with a squirrel just chilling on my living room couch — still can’t explain that one. So arriving on campus and watching the ballooned ver- sions of the crea- tures that people in my neighbor- hood once killed with rat poison was perhaps the largest culture shock I would experi- ence. While Ann Arbor is full of col- lege students subsiding on the ramen noodle diet, the most well fed crea- tures in our city were football-shaped rodents with a bushy tail. It defied all common sense, but so have squirrels for the greater course of their relationship with humans. Back home, squirrel roadkill was regular enough that you were bound to see one every block, with rotat- ing animal control trucks coming to shovel them up. One would think that natural selection would eventually cause the demise of squirrels dumb enough to dart directly into the path of a moving car, but nope, the miracle of nature finds a way again. The squirrels here in Ann Arbor escape explanation for all the oppo- site reasons. During football sea- son, SBNation writer Spencer Hall took his first trip to Ann Arbor to cover a game and the first thing he tweeted was “First Michigan obser- vation: BOLD SQUIRRELS.” I had a friend from North Carolina visit for the first time over the summer, and the first thing he did when we walked into the Diag was spend 10 straight minutes running after our squirrels trying to catch one. He failed. I asked a lot of hard questions. How are the squirrels so revered here? What did they do to deserve it? If God made everything, did he really make squirrels too? What is the mean- ing of squirrel life? How can I become aware to this full- ness of truth in devotion to this campus wildlife? I grappled with questioning this existential reality. I tried buying a Michigan Squirrels shirt. I even tried to feed one once, but it wouldn’t come near me, perhaps sensing my apprehension. I looked up to the trees and asked them to speak of meaning and answers to the continual confusion. It hit me one day. I was walking through the Diag, heard a snap and looked up once more to the trees. Falling from the skies was both a large branch and just behind it a squirrel. And it hit me. The squirrel hit my shoulder, rolled off onto the walkway, and scampered away as I stood there in awe. Every day I still walk through campus and stare at the squir- rels, forever in awe that however round they may be, they can still scurry up and down trees with such swiftness. Some things just have to be experienced and left unexplainable, perhaps some- thing even as inconsequential as our squirrels. — David Harris can be reached at daharr@umich.edu. DAVID HARRIS On squirrels “When I walked out of Angola, I didn’t realize how permanently the experience of solitary would mark me,” said Benjamin Sklar, a prison- er held in solitary confinement for 29 years. The isolated torture of one’s psyche is not even remotely an acceptable or humane punish- ment, yet it is still used consistently behind the walls of our prison sys- tem. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public health researcher, stated in The New Yorker, “Human beings are social creatures … to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.” During a lecture on the United Nations rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, a visiting law pro- fessor at American University, addressed the duties of assessing international and domestic pris- ons based on guidelines set by the UN according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He encountered friction when trying to receive consent to inspect pris- ons in politically closed countries, such as Russia and Korea. However, what perhaps is more surprising was the refusal of U.S. federal and state penitentiary systems to allow him to inspect their facilities. With only a handful of prisons allowing him full access to inspection, the UN must refuse to give any official reports on prison conditions in a given country. The mandates set by the UN on prisoner treatment are a check and balance system to hold governments accountable, however the duration and severity of solitary confinement creates widespread disagreement on the definition of torture. Benja- min Wallace-Wells, New York Mag- azine columnist, presents a piece on the government’s use of soli- tary confinement with the parallel effects of brutal torture on inmates. The piece in New York Magazine translated the events of a peniten- tiary-wide hunger strike to alleviate the harsh conditions of confinement in one of California’s highest secu- rity prisons. The Pelican Bay Secu- rity Housing inmates are isolated in concrete cells for the entirety of the day with only one hour to exercise in a personal cage outside. Wells’ research led him to look more close- ly into the account of a gang mem- ber placed at Pelican Bay for serious crimes. Although the inmate had previously led a life that many peo- ple would consider dangerous and against social norms, he described solitary confinement as almost 25 years of “continuous torture.” From a historical perspective, the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War demonstrated a framework that was drafted and signed by the U.S. as well as 95 international govern- ments. It reflected upon universal moral views for the treatment of foreign prisoners. In Article 3 of the Convention, it is stated that no pris- oners shall endure “outrages upon personal dignity,” as well as Article 30 which addresses isolation wards solely as outlets to protect patient prisoners and garner healing rather than mental wear. In countering against the aboli- tion of solitary confinement, author Robert Rogers argues that prisoner isolation can help protect younger inmates from the influences of career criminals. The report exam- ines the positive effects of keep- ing extremely volatile prisoners away from other inmates, noting a decrease in riots as well as a less significant presence of prison gangs and violence. This also affects the young prisoners released from jail; once back in society, they could be swayed to carry on crimes because of their time spent with career criminals. In reports by correctional researcher Paige Ferguson from prisons in Washington state , the state facilities used an experimen- tal program on those same volatile inmates with long-term mental health counseling. Attention to mental health stimulated positive effects in prisoners, thus resulting in a smaller number of participants returning to isolation for behavior- al correction. Ferguson also points to the effects of solitary confine- ment on society once prisoners are released. Without consistent socialization, ex-convicts are prone to revert back to crime when faced with the task of re-assimilating to normal society. Programs of exten- sive mental health aid and counsel- ing would be increasingly beneficial substitutes to the harsh implica- tions of solitary confinement. Beyond Ferguson’s findings, I feel our country would be able to bypass the abusive policies of pris- oner segregation if there was better mediation on what crimes war- ranted prison time. If perpetrators of petty crimes were sentenced to more public works and community service instead of jail time, it would allow for a larger budget for men- tal health programs within pris- ons and, at the same time, benefit communities with the work of less threatening offenders. While solitary confinement may work as a means of prisoner pro- tection, its overuse has become a mentally damaging form of torture in the U.S. prison system. Segregat- ing problematic members of soci- ety needs to be disassociated as an acceptable practice. Instead, the correctional facilities should focus on improving the mental health and well-being of inmates. Kirk Acharya is an LSA junior. Ban solitary confinement Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Devin Eggert, David Harris, Jordyn Kay, Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble, Michael Paul, Allison Raeck, Melissa Scholke, Michael Schramm, Matthew Seligman, Linh Vu, Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS MARIS HARMON KIRK ACHARYA | VIEWPOINT The most well fed creatures are football- shaped rodents with a busy tail. Who wasn’t thinking of Michael Brown and Eric Garner? a leftside from this day in 1984 CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit viewpoints on literally anything! Viewpoints should be 550-850 words. Send the article, writer’s full name and University affiliation to opinion@michigandaily.com. SEX. DRUGS. UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION. LET’S TALK. Edit board: every Monday and Wednesday at 6 p.m. Email: opinion@michigandaily.com