Opinion

SHOHAM GEVA
EDITOR IN CHIEF

CLAIRE BRYAN 

AND REGAN DETWILER 
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS

LAURA SCHINAGLE
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, February 26, 2016

Earlier this month, rookie NYPD Officer 

Peter Liang was convicted of manslaughter 
for the death of Akai Gurley. This punish-
ment is being hailed as a landmark convic-
tion in the fight to stop police brutality and 
the repeated shootings of unarmed Black 
men by the police. However, Gurley’s death 
differs from many other shootings because 
Officer Liang did not intentionally shoot, 
but rather accidentally discharged his 
weapon, which ricocheted into Mr. Gurley. 
Also controversially, Liang was only a rook-
ie, and was paired with another rookie and 
placed in one of the most dangerous hous-
ing projects in New York City. He wasn’t 
properly trained in when to use his weapon, 
and didn’t have a superior officer present to 
direct him.

While I am happy there is finally some 

degree of justice for a shooting of an 
unarmed Black man by a police officer, I am 
not happy the NYPD has made Officer Liang 
— an Asian American — the scapegoat for 
hundreds of shootings perpetrated by white 
officers. In this case, rather than seeking 
real justice, it feels as though the NYPD is 
going after a minority officer to “make up” 
for hundreds of unjust killings.

Since 1999, there have been more than 175 

fatal shootings by on-duty officers in New 
York City. Of these, only three have led to 
indictments. Before the conviction of Liang, 
only one shooting led to a conviction.

That case, the 2003 shooting of Ous-

mane Zongo, involved a plainclothes officer 
intentionally shooting an unarmed Black 
man in the back four times. That officer, 
Bryan Conroy, is white and was convicted 
of criminally negligent homicide. He was 
sentenced to probation. Now, Officer Liang 
is being sentenced to up to 15 years in prison 
for accidentally discharging his weapon.

In a perfect world, justice would be served 

for every unjust shooting, but unfortunate-

ly, this is not a perfect world. Eric Garner’s 
murderer was let off the hook in the same 
city, despite a video showing him violating 
a protocol by putting Garner in a chokehold 
and killing him. Even other accidental police 
shootings, like the shooting of Aiyana Stanley-
Jones in Detroit, led to charges being dropped 
and jail avoided. In the case of Jones, a white 
Detroit police officer killed a seven-year-old 
girl in her sleep during a SWAT raid on the 
wrong house. His charges were dropped, 
despite the fact that he had accidentally killed 
a young girl. The only difference between 
Liang and the DPD officer is their race.

I’d like to stress that I believe Peter Liang 

should go to prison. Anyone who kills anoth-
er person, criminal or cop, should face jus-
tice. The problem is this shooting is another 
example of racial discrimination against peo-
ple of color by the justice system. This senti-
ment is highlighted by the New York City City 
Comptroller John Liu, who said, “In the wake 
of unfortunately so many deaths of unarmed 
Black men, some cops gotta hang. The senti-
ment in the Asian community is: It’s easier 
to hang an Asian, because Asians, they don’t 
speak up.” And that is exactly what is going 
on in this case.

Justice is necessary in our society. How-

ever, racial bias disguised as racial justice 
is not acceptable. Don’t be so quick to cel-
ebrate the conviction. Had Peter Liang been 
white, this case could have gone much dif-
ferently. Maybe this is the first step in a long 
road to equality, but most likely, this is just 
another act of racism by the justice system.

I won’t celebrate the conviction of Liang, 

but I will celebrate if one day, the officers 
like the ones who killed Eric Garner and 
Aiyana Jones — white men who knew what 
they were doing — face the same standard of 
justice as Peter Liang.

—Kevin Sweitzer is an Editorial Board member. 

Racism disguised as justice

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Caitlin Heenan, Jeremy Kaplan, 

Ben Keller, Minsoo Kim, Payton Luokkala, Kit Maher, 

Madeline Nowicki, Anna Polumbo-Levy, Jason Rowland, 

Lauren Schandevel, Melissa Scholke, 

Kevin Sweitzer, Rebecca Tarnopol, Ashley Tjhung, 

Stephanie Trierweiler, Hunter Zhao

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

 

— President Barack Obama, during an address Tuesday morning.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“For many years, it’s been clear that the detention facility 

at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our national 

security — it undermines it”

I 

was recently rejected when I took a 
chance and decided to ask out the guy 
I’m into. To be quite honest, it was 

mortifying. I’m still try-
ing to come back from 
it. The moment it hap-
pened, I texted everyone 
I knew, frantically hop-
ing for someone to tell 
me it wasn’t the end of 
the world, even though to 
me it was. It was among 
the dozen or so replies I 
received in the wake of my 
dilemma that I realized 
just how useless it is to 
seek comfort after some-
thing as silly as someone saying no.

There’s this weird habit among girls when 

it comes to helping each other face rejection. 
When a boy says no to us, it’s a knee-jerk reac-
tion to exclaim “He’s intimidated! We’re too 
smart, we’re too pretty, we’re too funny and 
they’re too insecure, too scared or their egos 
are too fragile to be able to deal with it.” As 
though the worst thing in the world is for a 
boy to just genuinely not like us. 

I’ll tell you right now I’m the furthest 

thing from being intimidatingly pretty, 
smart or funny. I stand at 4 foot 11 with 
frizzy hair and big scary eyes. I laugh way 
too hard at my own jokes even when no one 
else is laughing. I’ve been known to make 
awkward comments and talk far too often 
about chickens. I’m nothing extraordi-
nary. In fact, I’m a little weird. There’s no 
way anyone could ever find me the least bit 
intimidating, unless I’m hungry and even 
then I’m probably more akin to the puny 
Scrappy Doo, always futilely trying to fight 
the big monsters. 

The other fraction of the answers I 

received consisted of some variation of “You 
don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t 
want to be with you anyways.” Technical-
ly this is true. I don’t want a guy to lie and 
string me along pretending to like me for 
the sake of protecting my feelings. I under-

stand what my friends are saying is only a 
defense mechanism to try to make me feel 
better. But I don’t think we should cut down 
the guy who rejects one of us, or tell each 
other that we “wouldn’t want to be with 
him anyways” — because we do. We want 
to be with the boy who doesn’t like us. We 
still think he’s great and his rejection isn’t 
a good judge of his character. We’re allowed 
to be hurt and still want the boy who doesn’t 
look at us in that way. I think that’s OK. 

Sometimes we like a boy and he doesn’t 

feel the same. Is there something inherently 
wrong with him for not being into me? Am I 
an unlovable little troll?

I like to think of this as the cultural 

equivalent of men saying women are crazy 
when we show our emotions. It makes us 
feel inferior, as though we are unable to 
handle ourselves. The implication is very 
much the same when we jump so fast to the 
conclusion that men are just intimidated of 
a woman asking them out — that men can’t 
handle not being the dominant figure.

How many times have we, as women, 

rejected a guy who was perfectly nice based 
on a simple lack of attraction? It was noth-
ing against them. We weren’t intimidated by 
their intelligence, their looks or how funny 
they were. They were perfectly wonderful 
guys. We just didn’t view that guy in that 
way. So why is it so hard to accept the same 
might go for us?

Guess what? Sometimes men just don’t 

like us. Plain and simple. There’s nothing 
wrong with us and there’s nothing wrong 
with them. Moments like mine are humbling 
reminders that I’m good enough regardless 
of whether or not he likes me. Rejection 
sucks, but it’s not a testament to who I am 
as a person and it doesn’t mean he’s terrible 
for saying no.

Sometimes a simple no is all we need to 

hear for us to move on to things that are bet-
ter for ourselves.

—Olivia Puente can be reached 

at opuente@umich.edu.

When a woman is rejected

I

t’s been a tough week. I was 
lucky enough to evade exams, 
but a smattering of papers, 

meetings 
and 

readings 
ate 

up all my time. 
Between 
the 

stress of school 
and the confus-
ing weather out-
side, I couldn’t 
help but pine for 
summer.

For the 10th 

straight 
year, 

I’m 
returning 

to camp in the 
summer. It’ll be my second year 
working in the camp’s trip cen-
ter, where I’ll facilitate backcoun-
try hiking and canoeing trips for 
campers ages nine to 17.

The trips I lead are the same 

trips I took as a camper however 
many years ago. If you were to 
tell 11-year-old me that I’d be a 
tripper (as we’re so affectionately 
called), I probably wouldn’t have 
believed you. My relationship with 
my summer camp’s trip program 
has been complicated, to say the 
least. Capsizing canoes and pour-
ing rain didn’t exactly make for 
the most desirable experience. 
Still, a disproportionate amount of 
my memories from camp — espe-
cially those from my earlier years 
there — are from camping trips, a 
mere three or four days out of the 
24-day session.

Perhaps the brightest memory I 

have from my trips as a camper is 
the way my trippers would respond 
to our pleas to know the time. No 
matter what point of the day it was, 
the time the trippers told us was 
always — infallibly — seven o’clock.

Obviously as an 11-year-old, this 

was not an adequate answer to this 
question. (Granted, telling 11-year-
old me it was 5:45 when the time was 
actually 5:46 wouldn’t have been an 
acceptable answer.) It felt almost evil 
that they’d withhold the exact time 

— a seemingly harmless number — 
from us. It seemed the worst thing 
knowing the time would do was loan 
us some form of comfort or control.

My summer camp has since real-

ized that withholding the time from 
campers on trips merely heightens 
their anxiety, especially for those 
campers who have never been on 
a trip before. As a tripper, I am no 
longer allowed to tell my campers 
it’s seven o’clock. But I’ve come to 
question whether or not this “ban” 
is a good thing.

Two summers ago, I read Neil 

Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to 
Death,” which focused primarily on 
how technology changes discourse 
within a society. In the first chapter 
of this book, Postman uses the con-
cept of time to argue how technol-
ogy changes human perception and 
behavior. He argues that minutes 
and seconds never existed before 
the creation of the clock. The power 
of nature as timekeeper quickly 
subsided to these quantifiable mea-
sures of time.

I had never thought about our 

concept of time being based solely on 
man-made conventions before, and, 
by extension, I had never thought 
about the implications of such an 
unnatural mode of telling time. And 
while structured time may be neces-
sary for societal organization and 
progress, perhaps humans were not 
meant to lead lives according to the 
point values affixed to seconds and 
minutes and hours.

Yet how often do we find 

ourselves obsessing over these 
arbitrary measures of time? As 
students, we’re constantly remind-
ed of deadlines, meetings and lec-
tures, rigid in time, dictating our 
every action. Even as I write this 
article, I fret over the fact that I 
only have 26 more hours to com-
plete it, and between now and then 
I have classes to go to, meals to eat 
and homework to finish.

To compensate for the limited 

number of hours in a day, I often 

forgo opportunities to do things I 
actually want to do in order to free 
up more time for the assignments 
that demand completion by a cer-
tain date and hour. Instead of read-
ing a book I’ve been waiting to read, 
I’ll work on an English assignment; 
instead of exploring Ann Arbor, I’ll 
practice chemistry problems.

Of course, I attend this univer-

sity to receive an education, and I 
must do these things to rightfully 
earn my degree. I also find time to 
participate in activities I enjoy, but 
I can’t help but yearn for the days 
where I take out trips. When I lead 
trips, I get to break free from the 
constructs of time. The only dead-
line we have is the time the bus 
comes back to pick us up and take 
us home. The rest of the time we get 
to spend how we choose.

On trips, we eat not because it 

is time to do so, but because we’re 
hungry; we sleep not because it’s 
late, but because we’re tired; we act 
not because we feel like we’re wast-
ing time sitting idly, but because 
we want to do so. When we forget 
about time, we allow our spirits to 
run wild and free. And as a result, 
the gratification we feel from our 
actions is amplified greatly.

As college students, we constant-

ly try to find ways to fill our time, 
whether it’s catching up on a class’s 
reading or making progress toward 
our inevitable careers. In this, we 
often neglect that our college years 
are some of the last we have to do the 
things we’ve always wished to do 
without defaulting on our responsi-
bilities. Soon enough, we will have 
jobs and families and other obliga-
tions to tend to on a daily basis. So 
why not take some time off and do 
the things we love without worrying 
about the passing hours?

I may not be allowed to say it to 

my campers this summer, but for 
me, it’ll always be seven o’clock.

—Rebecca Tarnopol can be 

reached at tarnopol@umich.edu.

Seven o’clock

OLIVIA 
PUENTE

REBECCA 
TARNOPOL

I 

lowered myself onto a shrink-
wrapped examination table and 
focused on the ceiling tile grid 

above me while 
my 
physical 

therapist 
prod-

ded me with a 
cold, metal ultra-
sound probe. I 
rustled the sani-
tary paper on the 
table as I winced 
in 
anticipation 

for the pain that 
inevitably 
fol-

lowed the pro-
cedure. I never 
expected that such a painful physi-
cal condition would be incited by a 
mental illness.

I have experienced very acute 

pelvic pain for as long as I can 
remember. Pelvic pain frequently 
occurs in women as a response to 
different stress factors. For those 
who don’t know what pelvic pain 
feels like, it can feel anywhere from 
a slight cramping to a needle pok-
ing you in your abdomen or lower 
pelvic area. Pelvic pain is often 
chronic, and is frequently induced 
in women by certain stressors, 
such as sexual intercourse or preg-
nancy. Unfortunately, in my case, 
the sharp pelvic pain occurred 
during and after sex.

As you can imagine, this made 

sex extremely painful, frustrating 
and sometimes impossible. For the 
most part, my partners were sympa-
thetic to my situation, but I remained 
frustrated. To this day, I believe that 
being able to have consensual and 
enjoyable sex is a very important part 
of a healthy relationship. Not being 
able to experience the intimacy that 
comes with sexual intercourse was 
deeply exhausting.

The cause of the pain was 

unknown, but my primary doctor 
referred me to a physical therapist 

at the University of Michigan’s 
Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospi-
tal with the intuition that physi-
cal therapy might be a good first 
course of action to take. I put on 
a gown twice a week and sat on 
an examination table in a small, 
softly lit room and waited for a 
doctor to direct me in embarrass-
ing pelvic-strengthening physi-
cal therapy exercises. With every 
visit, the pelvic exercises became 
more invasive and mentally chal-
lenging. I couldn’t even begin 
to tackle certain exercises due 
to mental roadblocks that I was 
too scared to overcome. I ques-
tioned if the embarrassment was 
worth the physical therapy visits 
because, after all, this was a shot 
in the dark. No doctor knew if 
these exercises alone would actu-
ally help fix my problem. I noticed 
very little changes in my condi-
tions after six months of mentally 
straining physical therapy.

Recently, I learned that my gen-

eralized anxiety disorder strongly 
attributed to the presence of the 
pelvic pain that I experienced. The 
physical pain I experienced was ago-
nizing, but the mental suffering was 
worse. I worried incessantly about 
pleasing my partner or the act of 
sex itself. This worry triggered my 
body to defend itself by signaling my 
pelvis to contract, making penetra-
tion painful. I started to associate 
sex with pain and as a result of that 
I avoided sexual and romantic rela-
tionships with men and women in 
fear of the embarrassment that came 
with intercourse. It was noticeable 
that as my anxiety toward the situ-
ation grew, my condition worsened. 
I started to develop an unreasonable 
fear of the pain, and I was unable 
to progress in my physical therapy 
exercises without going into a panic.

As I treated my anxiety, I noticed 

a change in my level of personal 

comfort during romantic situations. 
My physical responses in these situ-
ations also benefitted tremendously 
as I paired physical therapy exer-
cises with anxiety treatments.

Painful penetration is a symptom 

shared by women who have anxi-
ety. It is common for women with 
anxiety to experience the inability 
to self lubricate, making sex pain-
ful. Anxiety-induced pelvic pain 
is another noteworthy example of 
how mental health directly affects 
physical wellbeing in women. It is 
important to be aware that, in many 
women, pelvic problems go untreat-
ed due to the lack of knowledge on 
this health issue.

For a long time, I didn’t know what 

caused the pain. I went in for physi-
cal therapy and ultrasounds, and 
even debated receiving steroid shots, 
all in the hope of relieving even the 
smallest amount of pain. It became 
evident to me that women’s health 
takes a backseat to men’s health 
when I learned that limited research 
has been done on the causes of pel-
vic problems in women. It continues 
to be very strange to me that even 
though many women suffer from this 
condition, there is a lack of interest in 
medical research on this topic.

Women have long been neglect-

ed in the medical world, especially 
women who come from backgrounds 
of abuse and poverty. It is impor-
tant that we continue to encourage 
women’s mental and physical health 
research so that we can produce 
knowledge and resources and make 
them widely available. We can create 
a strong support network between 
women through the sharing of per-
sonal anecdotes. The solidarity that 
we develop when we share our stories 
has the power to give us the courage 
to inspire change in women’s health.

—Hannah Maier can be reached 

at hannamai@umich.edu.

Intimacy, sex and anxiety 

HANNAH 
MAIER

KEVIN SWEITZER | OP-ED

