Opinion
JENNIFER CALFAS
EDITOR IN CHIEF
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and DEREK WOLFE
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MANAGING EDITOR
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EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
M
illennials have been cited as one of
the most narcissistic generations
in comparison to Baby Boomers
and Gen Xers. In an age of
selfies, instant gratification
and self-assurance in their
ability to manipulate tech-
nology, it’s no surprise mil-
lennials would be perceived
as vain.
Yet is there a moment
when this obsession with
the self directs an inward
focus on self-awareness and
self-consciousness in a way
that’s actually productive?
Self-consciousness
is
typically seen with a nega-
tive connotation under the premise that one is
unsure of oneself. I would challenge that prem-
ise. I view self-consciousness as being deliber-
ate and fully aware of one’s own existence. In
the midst of a generation of self-photographers
who capture images of our most beautiful,
most adventurous, strongest and accomplished
moments, it can be challenging to critically self-
evaluate our internal feelings with our relation-
ship with ourselves.
College is a transformational stage — a piv-
otal marker in defining what makes each of us
unique. The years spent in college are often
encouraged to be used as a period of self-dis-
covery. By the end of one’s college career, a
student should be able to answer the question,
“Who are you?”
Students are often befuddled by this ques-
tion. Their responses are usually a composi-
tion of one-dimensional characteristics such as
their major, their year in school, activities they
are involved in, how they self-identify and the
beauty pageant answer of wanting to make the
world a better place.
These obvious adjectives only graze the sur-
face of who we are. “Who are you?” is not an
easy question to answer; it requires thoughtful
understanding of oneself. Few times in life do
people set aside time to freely and intentionally
think about their priorities in life, how their
background influences those priorities, identify
their weaknesses, and strengthen and create a
realistic plan for themselves to make those pri-
orities tangible.
As I recall hearing my freshman year during
a Black Student Union meeting, college is the
best time to be selfish. With an infinite amount
of responsibilities, it can be difficult to strategi-
cally use college to prioritize your experiences
around getting to know oneself holistically, and
to know how one’s personality is enriched by
academics, extracurriculars and professional
opportunities. In college, there is an innumer-
able amount of chances for students to heighten
their personal development. Such opportuni-
ties can make students feel overwhelmed with
options, adding to the daily stresses many
undergo. Through the duration of my time in
college, Rihanna’s “Question Existing” chorus
constantly reminds me of three questions I can
use to check my self-awareness:
Who am I living for?
Is this my limit?
Can I endure some more?
Chances are given, question existing
Rihanna’s lyrics force me to reflect on what I
elect to involve myself in.
Why am I doing this? What benefit does this
give to me? What do I have to contribute? Am I
really giving the most of myself that I can to make
the most out of my experience and to feel utilized?
These questions serve dual purposes, both
as an exercise of checking one’s self-conscious-
ness and boosting self-confidence. How con-
fident am I in my own abilities, talents and
endurance to create and become the best ver-
sion I perceive myself to be? How will I hold
myself accountable for making sure I meet my
goals and expectations?
Distinguishing expectations I set for
myself and the expectations others have for
me is a process in itself. It can be difficult to
detach one from the other; often times, oth-
ers’ expectations can determine how we proj-
ect ourselves to the world. Yet, our passions
and talents best display themselves when we
set our own expectations.
As David Brooks, political and cultural
commentator, brilliantly points out in his
article about passion, “People who live with
passion start out with an especially intense
desire to complete themselves. We are the
only animals who are naturally unfinished.
We have to bring ourselves to fulfillment, to
integration and to coherence ... (People with
passion) construct themselves inwardly by
expressing themselves outwardly.”
Self-fulfillment is a lifelong journey. The
desire to complete oneself can be powerful, so
much so that it can be destructive to develop-
ing intimacy with ourselves. There’s a fine line
between self-consciousness being productive
and being harmful. When the process becomes
antagonizing or isolating, we become vulnera-
ble to doubt and fear, and can begin to mistrust
our abilities. If we give into these misgivings,
we stunt our own personal growth and fail to
challenge ourselves to adjust to our current
stage in the self-learning process. In our reflec-
tions, we must know ourselves well enough to
identify these boundaries, and recognize when
our discomfort comes from true pain rather
than from the fear of understanding a level of
ourselves we never had encountered before.
In one of James Baldwin’s best works, “No
Name in the Street,” he wrote, “I have always
been struck, in America, by an emotional pov-
erty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of
human touch, so deep that virtually no Ameri-
can appears able to achieve any viable, organic
connection between his public stance and his
private life.”
In a global society that seems emotionally
bankrupt — reminding its inhabitants con-
stantly that Black lives don’t matter, where our
schools are still segregated by race and income,
where civil liberties are contractual, where
laws sustain cycles of poverty and second-class
citizenry for ex-offenders from our iniquitous
criminal justice system, where structures of
power can commit heinous crimes against
human rights while powerful nations act as
bystanders and where historical injustices still
need to be absolved — it’s imperative that we
are rooted in fundamental understanding of
ourselves and our role in this society.
To be our most authentic selves, our public
stances and private thoughts must conjoin at
a comfortable level of dissonance. Self-inter-
rogation can be draining, but it’s necessary for
growth. If we do not know ourselves intimately,
how do we know our place in the world? How
can we relate to one another? How can we
become agents of change and progress if we do
not challenge ourselves to evolve?
But before you answer those questions,
take a selfie.
— Alexis Farmer can be reached
at akfarmer@umich.edu.
ALEXIS
FARMER
#Selfie
I
don’t believe in ghosts and
probably never will, despite
my father’s best efforts. He
grew up off a
little
wooded
lane called Cuba
Road. It’s sup-
posedly one of
the most haunt-
ed places in Illi-
nois, and had the
stories to boot:
“There’s a ghost
of an old man
who walks the
road back and
forth looking for
his family,” he’d
say. “Never pick him up, Tommy,
when you’re old enough to drive.”
And then, of course, there was
the ghost of the tricycle-riding
5-year-old. The peddling spectre
would appear if you drove past the
old asylum. “I’m not lying to you,
son. You best stay away from that
old asylum, now, you hear?”
I never did confirm if there’s an
old asylum out by Cuba Road, but
not for lack of looking. In middle
school, we’d hike through the
marsh that’s just north of Cuba
Road, never finding anything but a
rusty saw we assumed, naturally,
the asylum used for lobotomies.
It wasn’t ghosts or death we were
afraid of, but boredom, as most chil-
dren are.
But it’s possible, growing up, to
learn to be afraid of the dark. With
good reason.
When I was 16 years old, I spent
a week on an Indian reservation in
South Dakota. I was doing charity
work, and that sort of thing was
expected of a young person from
a good Christian background and
a well-to-do town. And who, one
day, would need something to write
about in college application essays.
We worked most days fixing up
houses. Sometimes we built fences,
protecting the Lakota’s pastures
from coyotes and wild dogs in the
reservation’s interior. Much of the
reservation is 400 square miles of
prairie, empty except for predators
and wild horses. It was also the site
of the notorious pre-Columbian
Crow Creek Massacre. Somewhere
out there is a mass grave, a remnant
of a conflict in which the invaders
scalped most villagers and the oth-
ers were decapitated, though I sup-
pose that’s not mutually exclusive.
Kids of the reservation know not
to wander into the interior, mostly.
Sometimes a young one will get
lost. I heard a story once about a
5-year-old who followed a stray dog
out of camp and never came back.
They looked for a few days with-
out any sign of him, though no one
knew how he got that far.
The last night of the trip, after
the sweat lodge, we were given time
to reflect. I was never one for reflec-
tion, especially at 16, and managed
to convince a few other volunteers
to hike into the interior.
“My wallet,” I lied. “I must have
left it by the sage fields.”
I just wanted to see the stars
from out there. They were the best
on the reservation since there was
no light.
“I hike at home all the time,” I
said. “And I want to pick some sage
as a souvenir.”
I didn’t pick sage while the Lako-
ta were around, since their custom
is to pick ritual sage in a particular
fashion while making offerings of
tobacco as payment.
We lost the trail within an hour.
A mile into our hike, we saw a black
dog staring at us, eyes glowing in
the flashlight beam. We ran until
we realized we’d lost the path. Now,
the flashlight was blinking out, and
we were hopelessly lost. What’s
more, our luck had turned sour.
I tripped and landed on a cactus.
Another hiker tripped and fell into
a shallow ravine. It had been about
three hours by now. We wondered
if they would start looking for us
soon. We wondered if they even
noticed we were gone. And lastly,
we thought about the missing little
boy who followed the stray dog,
and the black dog that had stared
at us and scared us off the trail, and
how diseased it looked, and how we
could all smell it, still, an oppres-
sive stench that conflated with the
darkness to terrify us.
I had a bundle of sage in my
fist, which I’d taken without offer-
ing any tobacco. When the group
turned on each other, a la “The
Blair Witch Project,” my stolen sage
and I were the target.
“Just put it back,” some of them
said. “You don’t know. I know you
don’t believe but you don’t know,”
they begged.
But I did know. Taking a plant
didn’t have anything to do with get-
ting lost. “OK,” I said, pretending
to drop the bundle. But I kept it. I
tucked it into my back pocket.
It was fine until someone point-
ed the flashlight at a bush, and
I thought it was the black dog. I
sprinted away, off into the dark-
ness, leaving the group behind.
Here’s what I learned wandering
around a haunted Indian reserva-
tion at night by myself: It doesn’t
matter if the ghosts are real if the
fear is. Fear got me lost, not ghosts,
but the result was the same. I might
never be found.
I dropped the sage. No one was
there to see it, so I didn’t do it for
them. But it was my way of admit-
ting to myself that I was afraid.
Sometimes that’s all you can do in
the face of ghosts: admit that you
are afraid, and that you don’t know
what’s next, and that you’re sorry,
and scared, and that you are afraid,
you are afraid.
When they found me, I was
walking deeper into the interior.
I’d heard a howling; I was hoping
it was the dogs around camp. Ten
Lakota kids went looking for us in
an off-roader and found the rest of
the group. They spent the better
part of an hour following me in.
The Lakota had a black dog with
them, covered in swollen ticks and
with hardly any hair. His name was
Caleb, and he helped them find us.
“We’ve got to go,” the kid driving
said. “Haven’t you noticed? A storm
is coming in from the west.”
That was why it had been so
dark. A cloud moved toward camp,
blinking out the stars as it came.
By the time we got back to camp,
wind was ripping our tents from
the ground. We slept in the chief’s
basement, all of us curled up like a
mass of voles, and in the morning
we collected what was left of
our belongings.
We found our things 100 yards
from where they were. Almost all of
our things, anyways. I lost a pair of
jeans, the one with my wallet in the
back pocket. I wonder sometimes, if
I went back to the sage field where I
lied and said it was, if I’d find it there.
— Tom West can be reached
at tkwest@umich.edu.
The ghost of fear
TOM
WEST
F
or years, we’ve all felt it. Life
seems to be getting more
and more expensive. And
for years — for
most of us —
complaining
about low pay,
car
payments
and
rising
housing
costs
seemed to be
the solution.
Then boom.
Earlier
this
year, Ann Arbor
was ranked the
eighth-most
economically
segregated city
in the nation. We’re definitely a cul-
ture and a generation that loves our
news in rankings and list form. And
sure enough, this news went viral.
Now I appreciate any wake-up
call, Buzzfeed-style or otherwise.
But simply being ranked eighth-
worst doesn’t tell the full story.
What does economic segregation
really mean in Ann Arbor?
A desirable city attracts people
who can choose to live anywhere.
And people who can choose to live
anywhere make a city even more
desirable. At first glance, it’s a nice
problem to have. But it’s also a cycle
that has a lot of unintended conse-
quences — consequences dispro-
portionately felt by those who don’t
have the luxury of choice.
In any city, there’s always visible
poverty. We’re quite aware of the fact
that there are residents who live on
our streets. Unfortunately, it’s usu-
ally an awareness measured only in
spare change. But it’s the economic
hardship that we don’t see, the hard-
ship faced by neighbors and cowork-
ers, that’s the most pervasive and
toxic to a healthy community.
Since 1979, the top 10 percent of
Ann Arbor incomes have jumped
almost 19 percent. That’s mean-
ingful economic growth that you
can be proud of. But that growth
is matched by a staggering drop in
income for the bottom 10 percent
of our community — a drop of more
than 14 percent. I have a hard time
being proud of growth if it isn’t felt
by my neighbor. And neighbors
aren’t feeling that growth. In fact,
they’re feeling the opposite.
There’s a timeless maxim that
says work is the greatest form of
welfare. But not all work is cre-
ated equal, and that inequality is
felt by many people. Prior to taxes,
a couple both working minimum-
wage jobs, with two kids, would
need to spend about 44 percent of
their annual combined income on
a one-bedroom apartment in Ann
Arbor. If they wanted to give their
kids a separate room to share, that
number jumps to about 58 percent,
nearly double what the federal gov-
ernment defines as remotely afford-
able. That doesn’t really leave room
in the budget for a car, let alone
food. For the wage-earner — the
person who waits our tables, serves
our coffee or cleans our classrooms
— life in Ann Arbor seems increas-
ingly impossible.
But while those numbers are
alarming, the story is more com-
plicated than the richest and the
poorest. As the gap between the
top and bottom of income grows,
so too does the size of its middle. In
Ann Arbor, the starting salary of a
public school teacher before taxes
is just over $38,000 — still only
half the median income of the city.
To live in that same one-bedroom
apartment, a new teacher would
need to spend nearly 40 percent
of his or her annual salary on rent
alone. Professionals who once lived
comfortably in communities are
being pushed out. Clearly, there is
a “Missing Middle” in the housing
market.
As of now, Ann Arbor’s solution to
rising costs and increasing inequal-
ity is to export people to Ypsilanti.
Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti may only
be 10 miles apart, but our neighbor
can feel a world away. With average
rental rates hanging about $200 per
month lower than equivalent units
in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti has become
our affordable housing option.
As of now, Ann Arbor’s solution
to the 10 miles separating our two
communities has been expanded
public transit. I believe public tran-
sit to be a public good — one wor-
thy of investment. But this isn’t a
sustainable solution. It’s a bandage
on a wound that’s bleeding human
capital, draining our community of
economic opportunity and disman-
tling our inclusive character.
The solution has to be holistic.
It has to take wage and transit and
housing into account. It has to be
thoughtful in design and decisive in
implementation.
This is a crisis affecting every
city across the country. As we
graduate, look for work and decide
where we settle, it’s a crisis that
will affect each of us.
Ann Arbor City Council has
pledged to do its part by creat-
ing 2,800 new units of affordable
housing in the next 20 years. This
can’t be lip service. This goal has to
be matched with clear resolve and
opportunities taken.
It’s a complex issue that has to
be approached very intentionally.
But we can tackle that in my next
column. For now, simply put, if you
work in a community or serve a
community, you deserve the oppor-
tunity to live in that community.
Unfortunately for many, that
opportunity is fading.
— Zachary Ackerman is an LSA
senior and member-elect of the Ann
Arbor City Council. He will take office
Nov. 16, representing Ward 3. He can
be reached at zdack@umich.edu.
That time we went viral
ZACHARY
ACKERMAN
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