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