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

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, March 21, 2016

I 

was 12 years old the first time I broke 
my arm. The next school day, I walked 
into class and all of my friends ran over 

to sign my bright orange cast, ask how I was 
doing and reassure me that they were there 
should I need anything.

I was 13 years old when I was officially 

diagnosed with an extreme case of anxiety 
disorder. Nobody ran over to ask how 
was I doing or to reassure me they were 
there should I need anything. It was not 
something people openly talked about.

I was 18 years old and in the middle of my 

freshman year of college the second time I 
broke my arm. I walked into my sociology 
discussion the next day and several students 
ran over to ask how I was doing and reassure 
me they were there should I need anything.

Around that same time, my anxiety was 

growing day by day and I couldn’t have been 
more unhappy. I felt isolated, alone and sad. 
Nobody was asking me how I was doing 
or reassuring me they were there should I 
need anything. It was not something people 
openly talked about.

I was comfortable talking about any 

visible pain I was feeling on the outside. 
I was not comfortable talking about the 
invisible pain I was feeling on the inside. I 
felt ashamed, embarrassed and disgraced.

This stigma, the stigma toward mental 

health, plays a negative role in my life and 
in the lives of far too many college students 
and others — even from a young age. Only 
recently has the discussion of mental health 
and wellness become something we talk 
about openly.

As I have continued through college and 

my work with mental health advocacy, as 
an incoming Wolverine Support Network 
director and Central Student Government 

representative, has progressed and become 
a passion, I am becoming more comfortable 
telling my story, asking others theirs, 
facilitating small group discussions, and 
talking about internal pain. But sadly, I 
am in the minority. Far too many students 
experience isolation as part of and as a 
result of their internal pain, having nobody 
who will run over to offer a helping hand.

If we can create a campus community that 

fosters acceptance and understanding of all 
forms of illness and encourages students to 
discuss issues that cover all aspects of the 
mental health spectrum, then maybe — just 
maybe — one fewer college student will 
become a statistic. I believe that we need 
to have open discussion and dialogue about 
mental health through this aforementioned 
mutual understanding.

Thanks to the Internet and social media 

outlets, our generation, unlike any other 
before us, has access to the world. We 
have the platform and an audience at our 
fingertips to speak with about issues that 
formerly were not openly talked about. 
Because of this advantage, we should make 
it our mission to take the endless resources 
available to us and work to shatter this 
stigma. It is our duty to be the change, to 
take a stand and to continue to write the 
stories of those who are affected by mental 
health disorders, because failure to do so 
could be putting people’s lives on the line.

Let’s start treating mental health like 

we treat a bright orange cast on the arm 
of a 12-year-old. If not now, when? If not 
us, who?

—Sierra Stone is a 

Wolverine Support Network director and 

Central Student Government representative.

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

G

overnments can create free markets. 
This sounds counterintuitive, but 
there was a time when the Republican 

Party enacted legislation 
and produced regulation 
to protect free markets 
from themselves. When 
was this mythic time when 
parties weren’t ruled by 
dogma? The Progressive 
Era 
during 
the 
1900s 

featured a coalescence of 
parties wherein President 
Roosevelt crafted laws that 
prevented 
corporations 

from acting in predatory 
ways. 
These 
then-new 

statutes enhanced and protected free markets 
rather than undermining them. Government 
intervention is not necessarily the opposite of 
free markets; rather, it can save free markets 
from their auto-cannibalistic tendencies. 
Contemporary 
political 
discourse 
has 

forgotten this lesson to ill effect; it would serve 
us well to dismantle this false binary between 
government intervention and free markets.

***
A Davidson Parable: Last Thanksgiving, 

my brother and I gorged ourselves on 
guacamole out of a Jeb! bowl (which was 
in vogue at the time*). Our prodigious (or 
horrifying) guac consumption eventually 
attracted the attention of our cousin, Tim, 
who came over and told us that we needed 
a free market intervention so that he could 
enjoy some. But is that what really needed to 
happen? Or had my brother and I created a 
monopoly that shackled the rest of the world 
with its sheer force? If this was the case, 
then antitrust laws would be appropriate. 
To speak in platitudes, it’s a matter of 
perspective. My cousin saw the issue as 
one of sprawling, unchecked state control, 
while from our vantage point, the problem 
lay in our private consolidation of power. 
One more platitude: Any system can become 
oppressive when it expands beyond control.

***
One common claim within socialist and 

anti-capitalist discourse is that capitalism 
only cares about profit. This is part of a larger 
attempt of these parties to claim a monopoly 
on morality. The connotation of the word 
“profit” is crucial here; it is a pecuniary, 
material word. When socialists discuss 
their belief system, they highlight abstract, 

normative values such as equality rather 
than anchor it to material good. However, 
capitalism does have normative values — 
growth, for instance. Promoting growth 
and redistribution are equally moral goals. 
Capitalists would do well by themselves 
to remember that and use growth as a lens 
when making policy decisions or within 
more everyday political discussions.

There is a second narrative that claims 

capitalism is antithetical to social welfare. 
Capitalism has a focus on growth rather 
than equality, which, at first glance, doesn’t 
seem to align with the collective good. 
However, the primary driver of this growth 
is competition between businesses. Can this 
competition create social good? The United 
States’ private sector has been a leader in 
medical advances for much of modern history. 
Unlike other Organisation for Economic 
Co-operation and Development nations that 
have socialized medicine, we have given 
individual businesses the higher position. 
These companies have competed for greater 
profit, which has continually advanced our 
medical knowledge and saved lives. 

This is not a blanket defense of our medical 

system. The incentive structure of medical 
research businesses has changed and now 
there is a much greater focus on paying out to 
shareholders than there is on groundbreaking 
research. The fact that the United States has 
more citizens uninsured than any other OECD 
country is unacceptable. Martin Shkreli’s 
— and by extension the pharmaceutical 
industry’s — ability to raise the price of a life-
saving HIV drug 5,000 percent overnight 
should not be tolerated.

All 
things 
considered, 
the 
broader 

business model of acquiring copyrights 
and patents but not developing them 
in a meaningful way is one of our 
system’s most egregious failings. By not 
essentializing the government’s role in a 
capitalist country as either regulating and 
curtailing free markets or deregulating 
and encouraging free markets, we can have 
a more meaningful conversation about 
how to restore competition and equality of 
opportunity in America.

*Disclaimer: My family is neither bougie 

enough nor ironic enough to own a $75 Jeb! 
guacamole Bowl.

—Roland Davidson can be reached 

at mhenryda@umich.edu.

Not a binary

T

his 
past 
week, 
I 
was 

reminded of a powerful 
concept. It is rooted in 

this quote from 
the film “V for 
Vendetta”:

“We are told 

to 
remember 

the idea, not the 
man, because a 
man can fail. He 
can be caught, 
he can be killed 
and 
forgotten, 

but 400 years 
later, 
an 
idea 

can still

 
change 
the 
world. 
I’ve 

witnessed firsthand the power of 
ideas. I’ve seen people kill in the 
name of them, and die defending 
them.”

In other words, the powerful 

concept is the gravity of an idea. 
Ideas have the capacity to create 
and destroy, to bridge reality with 
the imaginary, and will outlive 
any one individual. 

In political terms, our state can 

simply be viewed as just that: an 
idea. And, since it is an idea, the 
state can morph into whatever 
form we construct. 

In the United States, the idea of 

our state largely rests on a Dream. 
You’ve heard it before. It goes 
something like this: Get educated, 
work hard, buy a home and a car 
and live in harmony.

I recently met two people who 

had fully adopted this mentality. 
The first was a Mexican-born 
American. He drove a city bus in 
San Diego at night and worked a 
second job during the day. When 
we spoke, he derided many people 
who took his bus. In his mind, they 
did not seem to work hard or work 
at all. They were given much and 
took it all for granted. They “stunk 
of weed” and mostly remained 
vessels of untapped potential.

The second man had worked 

as an IT manager. He complained 
about 
paying 
for 
Obamacare, 

which he saw as something that 
made him sacrifice his health care 
for others’ (even after explaining 
that he didn’t actually pay more 
because his wife benefited from 
the new health care plan). Still, he 
did not want to pay for something 
that 
he 
thought 
in 
no 
way 

benefited him. He did not want to 
pay for other people’s health. 

Neither of these individuals 

believed that they owed anything 
to the state because the state had 
given them nothing. The state 
stayed out of their way and, in 
return, they were able to succeed 
as they saw fit. Within this 
ideological framework, it would 
be an injustice for them to pay for 
others — paying for something 
that didn’t directly benefit them 
was unfair. This is the American 
Dream. 
Take 
nothing. 
Earn 

everything. Do it yourself. 

Our Dream never quite made 

sense to me. In truth, it has 
appeared to be more like a myth. 
Oftentimes, the term myth is 
preferred to describe the United 
States’ belief system since it masks 
or excuses what would otherwise 
be considered corruption, abuse or 
institutional injustice. 

From what I’ve learned, I 

know a state to be “an imagined 
community” of people with a 
specific boundary and a united 
goal. 
I’d 
like 
to 
emphasize 

one word in particular in this 
working definition: united. This 
word implies we all are invested 
in one another’s future. On a 
large scale, it means the actions 
of one person are not trivial or 
inconsequential to the actions 
you make. We are all connected.

Though the idea of statehood 

is tied to a definition, it is still 
an idea. In this vein, we can 
ascertain that a state can morph 
into anything (or need not even 
exist), as the physical laws of the 
universe do not bind it. That is, 
there’s nothing that necessitates 
a United States, Pacific Ocean or 

South America. 

In fact, there has been a 

choice (often by force and most 
frequently by white males) to 
divide the land and sea. Within 
these 
divided 
boundaries, 

there have been more choices 
to 
allocate 
resources 
and 

opportunities 
within 
these 

boundaries to differing groups 
of individuals. There is nothing 
biologically — inherently, based 
on nature — different about 
these groups of people. But 
even now, specific groups have 
become stratified, so much so 
that some groups of individuals 
are exceedingly better off, on 
average, in each country around 
the world. The American Dream 
has masked this story in the 
United States. 

Optimistically, however, our 

state could change tomorrow — 
if enough citizens so desired.

With an altered mindset, the 

amount of stratification, inequality 
or otherwise difference between 
these 
socially 
constructed 

groups could be closer to zero. 
Economically, 
politically 
and 

socially speaking, every individual 
could 
live 
more 
equal 
lives 

depending on how our constructed 
state allocates its resources. But 
this can only be true if we are to live 
in a place where citizens believe 
themselves to be part of a united, 
integrated cause. 

Unfortunately, I did not discuss 

the American Myth with the 
two men I had recently met. 
Personally, I did not have the 
energy to expend, explaining how 
we are united by systems that 
should progress every ones way 
of life. I could have accomplished 
something, though, if I’d only 
asked two questions: What is your 
idea of a state? And, how (and to 
whom) should it distribute its 
resources?

 
—Sam Corey can be reached 

at samcorey@umich.edu.

American myth

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ROLAND 
DAVIDSON

S

ometimes, in nameless dark 
spaces, I like to think about 
life after death. I do this 

because it strips 
events and goals 
of their messy 
impermanence 
and 
helps 
to 

place them in 
a broader per-
spective which, 
by and large, is 
a 
worthwhile 

exercise. 
Of 

course, 
for-

mally speaking, 
there isn’t much 
for the dead after death. But every 
single time I conduct this argu-
ably morbid exercise, I get this 
strong sentiment — a hazy, extrin-
sic desire that, once my days were 
written and closed, I be remem-
bered.

This seems odd. I had long felt 

I understood the futility of find-
ing self-worth or value in exter-
nal elements — the pointlessness 
of material goods, status, excess 
riches. Logically, my mind under-
stood that there is nothing post-
death. All that matters is what’s 
happening now, as it always has 
and always will, and I knew this. 
We aren’t the ones who preserve 
our post-mortem legacy. So why 
bother worrying about it? But I 
just couldn’t shake this desire, I 
could not shake this near-primal 
want to be remembered. How 
could I achieve this less-often val-
ued sort of legacy? How could I be 
remembered?

My father loved telling me 

about my grandfather. My appu-
pa 
— grandfather in my Malay-

alam tongue 
— was still a small 

boy when his father passed, but 
old enough to remember it. His 
character exuded diligence in 
both thought and action, and he 
eventually served as a lieutenant 
colonel in the Indian Army, where 
he ended up working for decades. 
He worked tirelessly to give those 
close to him a good life, both inside 

and outside the home. He worked 
with the will of a man wanting 
to give his sons a life better than 
he ever had. I know this because 
of the countless stories my father 
proudly told me. I remember my 
appupa as a tall man with grayed 
hair, who always stood as if he 
was aware yet humble of his own 
deeds. It may have been many 
years since he passed, but I still 
remember him.

While I might have only heard 

about my appupa’s life, I witnessed 
much of my father’s. I saw him 
wake up early every day; I saw him 
work and pray and cry and shout 
and smile. I was there for all his 
anger and honesty, all his pain 

and his love. I was there for all the 
stories, adventures, sacrifices and 
everyday happenings. My father 
made many sacrifices, most of 
which I will never hear about or 
understand because of the age gap 
between us. When I was a child, 
most of what my father did went 
unappreciated, but not unnoticed. 
I would come to realize that he, 
like his father before him, worked 
tirelessly for something larger 
than himself. I didn’t only hear 
tales through the ages; I was there. 
I saw my father living his life, try-
ing to be a good man.

Legacy, as it turns out, is not 

ordained by fame or fortune. It is 
purely about remembrance — at 
any scale. I know that in a few gen-
erations, my name will most likely 

be forgotten. There’s nothing to 
be done but to accept that fact. 
I can, however, take heed of my 
forefathers. They were men like 
any other: anxious, burdened, sad, 
afraid. But what matters is that 
they worked past that, they went 
beyond their own mortal aches 
and did whatever they could to 
ensure something better for those 
around them. They will not be for-
gotten for that.

We will be remembered with-

in our families and through our 
children. We will be remembered 
through the tales we tell one 
another before bedtime. We will 
be remembered through tender, 
comforting memories, in times 
both dim and merry. True, this 
isn’t a grandiose legacy. There 
won’t be parades or speeches or 
poems in our honor. But even if 
it is just for a little while, we will 
live on.

Sometimes I dream of the day 

I would get to hold my baby son 
tightly to my chest. I would pray 
that I never have to let him go. 
I’d well up and smile and look at 
a face too pure to live in this hor-
rible, cruel world. I’d hold a hand 
so tiny that it could barely wrap 
around my finger, a hand I’d hold 
and keep safe for as long as I pos-
sibly could. And as I sit there with 
him, it would dawn on me that 
my life was no longer solely mine. 
The reins have been handed over 
to this little child whom I would 
gladly protect and provide for.

Truth be told, I cannot wait to 

be with my child, standing with 
him through all the good times 
and bad, making sure he is doing 
fine and telling him that every-
thing will eventually be all right. 
I cannot wait to tell my son about 
my appupa, the resolute army man 
who always stood tall. Most of all, 
I cannot wait to tell him about my 
father, and how he was not only a 
good man, but a great one.

—Bharat Nair can be reached 

at bnair@umich.edu.

Vitam post mortem

 “How could I 

achieve this less-

often valued sort of 

legacy? How could I be 

remembered?”

BHARAT 
NAIR

SAM
COREY

SIERRA STONE | OP-ED

More than a broken arm