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
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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, February 27, 2015
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Peyton Luokkala, 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
T
his week, the Athletic Department announced a
need-based ticketing system for students of lower
socioeconomic status. In order to receive need-based
pricing, students must qualify for Federal Pell Grants. Given
how ingrained athletics are into the University’s identity, this
is an effort worth commending, as it allows more students to
expand their extracurricular experiences.
Last fall, the Athletic Department revealed
a roughly 38 percent decrease in student
football season ticket prices from $280 last
season to $175. Basketball season tickets will
be $200 and hockey will be $150. For those
who qualify for the need-based ticket prices,
tickets will be reduced to $100, $120 and $90,
respectively. According to Central Student
Government President Bobby Dishell, a
Public Policy senior who pitched the idea,
this is the first need-based ticketing program
in collegiate athletics.
There is no denying the role of athletics in
the University’s culture. As Dishell remarked,
“Michigan athletics, it’s something you see
so many people rally around.” Therefore,
it should be the priority of the University
administration and Athletic Department
to reach as many students as possible.
Implementing need-based ticketing is a
praiseworthy first step.
That said, the Athletic Department should
turn its focus to improving more areas of the
athletic experience for non-athletes. With the
lowering of overall ticket prices, combined
with the new need-based ticketing system,
football, basketball and hockey will likely
see an influx of students into an already-
filled student section. It must be ensured
that students will be able to fit reasonably
without instituting controversial seating
policies. Solutions include expanding the
size of the student sections in both Michigan
Stadium and the Crisler Center. Additionally,
along with the included T-shirt in the ticket
package, the Athletic Department should
consider a student discount at M-Den
locations to bolster school spirit.
Taking the initiative and making more
reasonably priced tickets available to students
receiving Pell Grants is an innovative and
much-needed program. It is another step to
improving the relationship between students
and athletics, one that became strained
during the era of former Athletic Director
Dave Brandon. The Athletic Department
should keep working on programs to reinforce
student support for the present and the future.
O
ver
the
past
semester
break, I decided to read my
grandmother’s memoirs —
an
unpublished
spiral
notebook
consisting of 150
pages, document-
ing her upbring-
ing in Romania,
France and Mex-
ico. I’m embar-
rassed to say that
this was the first
time I really read
her stories, aside
from occasionally
scanning
them
during moments when she was a
hot topic of conversation among
my family. Inscribed on the first
page is a note to her granddaugh-
ters: “Although you have known
me as your old grandma, I too was
once young, full of life, and living
through some incredible times,
including World War II.”
In her pages, she seamlessly
details her life as a young Roma-
nian girl, brought up under the
wing of her nursemaid. Her father
was a prominent Romanian physi-
cian who sought to find the cure
to cancer, working long hours in a
research lab and paying little atten-
tion to her in her young age. She
then moved to France, where she
lived in a Catholic girls’ boarding
school in order to hide her Jewish
identity. Eventually she and her
family escaped and fled to Mexico,
where she lived for a number of
years until her studies brought her
to the United States.
I read her memoirs with fascina-
tion. Every moment of her young
life was filled with fear — in reflec-
tion, something that sounds more
like adventure. Her adolescence
was filled with hunger. During the
war, the only things her family
could afford were broiled tomatoes.
I remember she hated tomatoes
because of that. However, the many
things she saw and experienced
were not unique to her — they
were unique to that generation.
My grandfather too, having come
to the United States from Austria
in the late 1930s, was then imme-
diately drafted and sent to combat
in the South Pacific. Of course, he
survived, but he returned to the
States as much an immigrant as he
had been when he first arrived, and
his life was spent living coin to coin,
paycheck to paycheck, until many
years later when he was finally
grounded in American society.
I fear that my grandparents’ gen-
eration is falling away slowly, becom-
ing a memory, and that I am left only
with this book of stories to remind
me that life during World War II was
not what it is now. I was only in my
early teens when I saw the movie
“Beginners.” It’s about a man, played
by Ewan McGregor, whose father
has just come out of the closet. It’s
not funny, really; it’s more a movie
about accepting your parents and
the differences that separate you.
But there’s a line in it that has always
stuck with me: “Our good fortune
allowed us to feel a sadness our par-
ents never had time for.”
Now, let’s substitute another
word for “sadness,” perhaps, “aim-
lessness.” And let’s substitute the
word “parents” for “grandparents.”
Now it reads like this: Our good
fortune allowed us to feel aimless-
ness our grandparents never had
time for. That sounds about correct.
The fact that I am writing this right
now, contemplating my feelings
about my family and its dynamics,
shows that I am not a part of that
generation. I am a product of Gen-
eration Y, the Millennials — kids
who were born anywhere from
1980 to 2000. We get a lot of shit.
We’re self-indulgent, lazy, tech-
savvy, tech-crazy, dependent and
selfish. Americans of Generation Y
can barely speak two languages —
my grandmother spoke seven, and
she wasn’t considered extraordi-
nary for it. My sister was recently
on vacation and saw a famous life-
style blogger at her same hotel. She
recognized a blogger as famous.
Surely, there is something wrong
with this picture.
But here is the problem. To say
that our generation is made up of
self-indulgent people because we
aren’t escaping a war or because we
aren’t living in more modest times
assumes that anyone living in a peri-
od of modernization is incapable of
feeling empathy and contributing
anything more than a blog to civili-
zation. As I was reading my grand-
mother’s memoirs, I was struck by
one thing in particular — the fact
that some of her social views were in
my mind completely backwards.
What we should give our genera-
tion — the self-indulgent, internet-
loving buffoons that we are — is
credit for our level of acceptance.
I’ve been proud to hear three of
my male friends over dinner open-
ly admitting to their bisexuality
without shame. I’ve witnessed my
peers lying on the ground at die-ins
promoting racial equality. I’ve sat
in rooms heavy with debate over
the current state of the drug war. I
watched a celebrity at the Oscars
meditate on the fact that today more
black males are incarcerated in the
U.S. than were enslaved in 1850.
These are small actions that have
made me hopeful for our genera-
tion. The fight for racial and social
equality wasn’t overtly present in
my grandmother’s memoir. Perhaps
that’s because she was busy surviv-
ing, but it’s also because they weren’t
there yet, but here we are now.
There are threads that tie all gen-
erations together, manifestations of
the human condition that will never
fade. My grandmother constantly
referred to her self-image problems,
issues that resonate with people in
any age. Although we are the genera-
tion that wallows in self-pity, adorn-
ing the Internet with our problems,
we’re also the ones that have begun
to stand up for what we believe in.
We have begun to accept people as
they are and so maybe, maybe, I feel
less envious of my grandmother’s
robust yet difficult life. Her chal-
lenges made it hard to care. And my
privileges make it easier to.
—Abby Taskier can be reached
at ataskier@umich.edu
Expanding the experience
Need-based ticket program lowers prices for Pell Grant recipients
My grandmother’s memoirs
ABBY
TASKIER
Stories
I
’m sitting on the second floor
of the UGLi at 10:30 p.m. on a
Friday night. As predicted, it’s
sparsely populat-
ed. My laptop has
drained to some-
where around half
battery
because
the
outlet
it’s
plugged into is,
unbeknownst
to
me,
non-func-
tional. I’m writ-
ing
equations
and
algorithms
in my notebook,
methodically within the lines and
with a dark enough stroke to be
noticeable by the scanner when I
eventually submit it online. This is,
rather unsurprisingly, not exactly the
way I envisioned my Friday night.
On the list of “Places Where
Things Happen at 10:30 p.m. on a
Friday Night,” the second floor of the
UGLi is somewhere at the bottom.
For once, the scene is quiet. I speak in
whispers to the friends I came with,
who are sitting across the table for
me, lest I disturb the next-closest per-
son, sitting 45 feet away. Whether or
not the desolation helped my produc-
tivity or not, I couldn’t tell. Because,
amongst the uncomfortable silence
and the numbers and equations I
sketch are the words and sentences
that float in my head, describing the
distracting details around me and
dancing around until they form some
semblance of, well, something.
Someone walks by, Starbucks cof-
fee in hand, presumably something
with a few shots of caffeine. He takes
a seat a few tables down, unpacks his
backpack, sets his 15-inch MacBook
Pro down, plugs it into the outlet and
begins to type. Perhaps he’s typing a
paper contrasting the Age of Enlight-
enment and the era of Romanticism.
Perhaps an e-mail to a professor, or a
job recruiter. Maybe a love letter to a
far-off friend … who knows.
It’s inconsequential, just the story
of some lone wanderer sitting alone at
a table with 20 other chairs, all neatly
pushed in and evenly spaced out at
this time of the night. Nothing more
than that momentary interruption
from the papers on my table and the
keyboard in front of me during that
occasional glance over the top of my
screen. Just another student, who,
like me, stumbled into some fate that
led to the disappointing conclusion of
being on the second floor of the UGLi
at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night.
Maybe the story isn’t in this floor
or this building, but behind the
people in it. Perhaps this subject is
a dual major in biochemistry and
cellular and molecular biology with
dreams of medical school. Or a stu-
dent in the endless struggle to make
ends meet, working 30-plus hours
a week and balancing 17 credits. A
computer science major in the midst
of launching his startup. An athlete
after a busy week of practice. Maybe
a CIA secret agent masquerading as
a student, taking up his residence in
the library each night to maintain
his undercover identity.
Somewhere in the infinitely count-
able set of stories that could lead to
the second floor of the UGLi at 10:30
p.m. on a Friday night is this new
friend, if you could call him that. So
is the story of the friends I arrived
with, cross-eyed Snapchatting as
they sit across from me. The story
of the janitor who clears the trash,
and of the student who waits at the
jammed printer hoping for the divine
intervention of a visit from ITS.
This is the crux of it all, that
somewhere stories connect, person-
ally or interpersonally, physically
or metaphorically. Stories as silly
as ones of cafeteria trays and squir-
rels, as serious as ones of childhood
dreams and of loss. That somewhere
in the inconsequential are words to
piece together and form things of
consequence even in the least rel-
evant of places.
So sometimes these words and
stories in my head get written down.
Sometimes they are printed. Wheth-
er materially captured or just emo-
tionally experienced, these stories let
us search for and find meaning with-
in the plot they encapsulate. These
stories form not only the escape from
the world we live in, but they describe
the way we experience it.
I finish the problem set I was
working on. Tear out the page from
my notebook, write my name in the
top left corner. Our new friend has
succumbed to the temptation of
sleep, head in his arms on the table
taking a nap. I’m tempted to join him.
The experience of the existential
reality that is the second floor of the
UGLi at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night
can be tiring.
—David Harris can be reached
at daharr@umich.edu
DAVID
HARRIS
A
subset of bills recently introduced into the Michigan
Legislature has prompted concern that attempts to protect
religious liberty in the business and healthcare sectors
will propagate discriminatory practices. Earlier this week, three
bills permitting faith-based adoption agencies to cite religious
beliefs as a reason to refuse service to either unmarried or same-
sex couples were proposed by a Michigan House committee.
Under the legislation, their refusal to serve these populations of
individuals would in no way decrease the state funding received by
these institutions. The emergence of this legislation demonstrates
a desperate need to modify the state’s anti-discrimination
policies and to re-examine the role of religion in businesses and
state-funded organizations.
These bills, offering religious exemptions
for adoption agencies, are merely an addition
to an already large amount of legislation
permitting discriminatory policies. A similar
initiative was proposed in 2013, with the
introduction of two bills that would enable
adoption agencies to deny the placement of a
child in a household based upon the couples’
sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
Denying individuals services based solely
upon a religious viewpoint is both an ethical
violation and a contradiction of the standard
of separation of church and state. Although
some jurisprudence, such as Burwell v. Hobby
Lobby, may merely blur the lines between
professional and personal beliefs by dictating
the extent of coverage for medical expenses,
other legislation advocating religious liberty
could lead to life-threatening scenarios.
For example, advocating the right of an
individual to refuse to provide services,
ranging from wedding planning to emergency
medical treatment, sets a dangerous and
terrifying precedent. Both situations would
be permitted under the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, which was reintroduced for
consideration in Michigan in last November.
Nationwide, roughly 19 states have adopted
some version of RFRA.
While protecting religious liberty is indeed
necessary in government dealings, a division
must be maintained between religion and
federally funded matters. Furthermore, while
the potential enactment of these bills seeks to
protect one group, another is left susceptible
to various forms of discrimination. For
example, the infant of a lesbian couple in
Michigan was denied treatment due to the
fact the parents’ relationship conflicted with
the pediatrician’s religious views. Scenarios
such as this one could reoccur if stronger
anti-discrimination laws are not enacted
within the state. The state’s current anti-
discrimination law, the Elliott-Larsen Civil
Rights Act, does not include protections for
members of the LGBTQ community, making
discriminatory
practices
against
these
individuals perfectly legal within the state
of Michigan. Passing these bills can only
result in negative consequences. Therefore,
allowing the enactment of these laws and
failing to revise current discrimination
protections would be a neglectful and
disturbing move by the Michigan legislature.
A dangerous precedent
Bills protecting religious freedom are safeguards for discrimination
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