W

hen my parents started 
feeding me music, they 
treated love songs like 
alcohol. Little tastes from their cups 
— sips of wine, accosting them if they 
guzzle down more beer than they’re 
allowed. And never any hard alcohol, 
because who gives a 10-year-old a 
shot of vodka?
They played love songs that 
were fluffy and light, interspersed 
on mixed CDs that rotated in the car 
stereos on rides lasting no more than 
10 or 15 minutes. One of the first was 
Bobby Vinton’s version of “Sealed 
With a Kiss,” a beachy tune about 
counting down summer’s end with 
letters between two lovers, each one 
“sealed with a kiss.” I can picture 
my mom driving the car and smiling 
warmly — her eyes closing for a 
tender moment at the red light as she 
sang along with Vinton.
Like a small kid’s tongue dipping 
into red wine, the song contained 
enough flavor of love to keep me 
wondering about the vast sweetness 
I could only experience when I was 
older, with the bitter aftertaste — 
the “cold, lonely summer” Vinton 
alludes to.
Through the succeeding years, 
my iPod was mostly pop songs and 
Broadway show tunes. The playlists 
on my iPod Nano were a flurry of 
jittery mid-2000s Britney Spears and 
Lady Gaga — easy enough to dance to, 
so the lyrical content was rendered as 
meaningless syllables.
When I was 13, however, my 
piano teacher gave me the shot of 
musical vodka. As I struggled to write 
my own songs, she suggested seeking 
inspiration in Joni Mitchell’s records. 
Her recommendation was “A Case of 
You,” a song about the determination 
Joni had to stay standing while taking 
swigs of her lover — like a case of 
wine — until she finished the bottle. 
It was too strong for this 13-year-old, 
being so potent with a longing that 
went deeper than any Bobby Vinton 
rendition. The song’s parent album, 
Blue, ran 10 songs long and sifted 

through every strain of heartbreak, 
insecurity and loneliness. If “A Case 
of You” was a shot, then Blue was a 
handle of liquor.
Yet, as though my taste buds 
weren’t ready, the meaning of each 
song was clear, but the heart of her 
words still proved illusory. Love 
was something that a 13-year-old 
was bound to feel only for his family, 
and even so, that kind of love was an 
entirely different beast. Still, I went 
through artists known to inspire 
and who have been inspired (which 
could include almost every singer-
songwriter of the years following 
Blue) by Mitchell. I found Laura Nyro 
and dusted off her strongest bottle, 
the album New York Tendaberry.
Like Mitchell’s voice, Nyro’s was 
acrobatic, yet struck by the emotional 
paralysis of heartbreak. Her mood 
shifted from yearning anxiety to 
resigned fate. In the opening track, 
“You Don’t Love Me When I Cry,” 
she confronts her lover for only 
distancing himself when she is at her 
weakest. I couldn’t understand why 
her voice was pulling at me so hard. 
As I grew older, I felt disingenuous 
every time I let the words diffuse into 
my blood.
I had never been in love. For 
years, I had feigned attraction to the 
opposite gender, fabricating love 
more than most people my age did, 
even with their seventh or eighth-
grade “boyfriend.” After I came out, 
love songs only distilled attraction 
and emotion more than before.
Love songs increasingly bog 
down my playlists, with heavy-hitters 
like D’Angelo’s ostensibly gentle 
profession of desire, “Really Love.” 
I thought I could transcribe the 
emotion into the bedroom of some 
guy I was hooking up with, putting 
on music in the background to 
make what D’Angelo was singing 
more palpable.
Instead, it feels like every time 
I accompany a Grindr hookup with 
one of my playlists, I just sully the 
meaning rather than connect with it. 

I’ve never been in a relationship — let 
alone felt love — and haven’t seen the 
prospects line up on the horizon.
Suddenly, the notes of each love 
song have unraveled into questions 
of my own inability to find love. 
They choke my capacity to connect 
by acting as reminders that I deceive 
myself when I try to feel, when I try 
to connect. I’ve failed in trying, and 
what was once a connection built on 
curiosity and longing is now just a 
sad, sputtering attempt at knowing 
what it means to be lovelorn.
As I’ve expanded my taste, I can 
connect with artists on different 
levels. I listen to Princess Nokia’s 
“Bart Simpson” and empathize 
with her experience as an outsider 
in school while still comprehending 
the vast contrasts in our lives. But, 
love songs continue to hinder the 
way I internalize music. The more 
my sex life becomes a smattering of 
empty kisses with strangers, the less 
I feel permitted to listen to songs that 
used to intoxicate my senses. Maybe 
the dizzying effect it once had on me 
is now too vertiginous, provoking a 
sense of guilt and self-pity for reasons 
I can’t fully grasp. I’ve become woozy 
— chugging like the college kid I am 
— lapping up the music as a substitute 
for the real thing and letting it pool 
up in the bowels of my mind. In the 
process, I think I’ve frustrated my 
sense for natural, real love.
I started shifting toward sinking 
myself into songs about being 
alone, like Mitski’s “Nobody,” 
a 
swelling 
indie-rock 
song 
about asking for nothing but 
meaningful, loving company.
But, as indulgent as works like 
that are, they just lead me in the 
direction of wanting the same thing 
the artist wants. And then I listen 
to another love song, knowing I 
shouldn’t be allowed.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Emma Chang
Ben Charlson
Joel Danilewitz
Samantha Goldstein
Emily Huhman

Tara Jayaram
Jeremy Kaplan
Lucas Maiman
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
Ashley Zhang
Sam Weinberger

DAYTON HARE
Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN
Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 
ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

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.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

ANAMARIA CUZA | COLUMN

What might mess up midterm elections
T

here 
was 
something 
inherently 
cringeworthy 
in reading about 11-year-
olds hacking into the database 
of Florida’s election website, not 
because the midterm elections are 
suddenly under the threat of middle-
schoolers, and not because hacking 
the 2018 midterm seems to be child’s 
play. Rather, it was the feeling that 
following the coverage of DefCon 
Voting Machine Hacking Village, 
a workshop at an annual security 
conference, the public was left with 
nothing more than the knowledge 
that democracy is literally in the 
hands of Russian hackers, and that 
there are some very brilliant 11-year-
old kids out there.
Add some smart hackers, dilute 
an issue until left only with its 
sensationalist side, skip all the boring 
parts in the process of solving it, and 
you get technology coverage. Tech 
coverage seems to resemble an ad 
infinitum repetition of these steps, 
with tech companies, non-profits 
and hackathons following suit and 
framing their problems and solutions 
emphasizing the new and shiny. The 
organizers of DefCon described 
the environment the kids used for 
election websites as “exact clones.” 
The press decided to use the same 
language: “Exact clones.” After the 
conference, the organizers cut down 
on their claims, changing the 
term to simply “clones.” When the 
National Association of Secretaries 
of State issued a press release 
complaining that the “environment 
in no way replicates state election 
systems,” Jake Braun, one of the 
organizers, replied that they were 
“fucking idiots” for not seeing that “a 
nation-state is literally hacking our 
democracy.”

Later on, a report revealed 
students were only working with 
look-alikes of election websites, 
with specific vulnerabilities added 
for the event and the participants 
coached on finding them. Still, 
Braun’s 
aggressive 
response 
is 
understandable: He wasn’t actually 
fighting for the legitimacy of his 
voting machines. He was fighting 
for getting the necessary media 
coverage to make the public aware 
of election cybersecurity issues. 
Instead, in the process, the core 
of these issues and their possible 
solutions got lost in hundreds of 
words on terrifying Russian hackers 
and brilliant middle-school hackers.
In response, ProPublica released 
an article on a completely overlooked 
key piece in election security: email 
system vulnerability. The two-
factor verification process is a way 
of logging in that not only requires a 
username and a password, but also 
something only the user has (i.e. a 
unique code on their phone). This 
type of logging in is so widely used 
that even we, as college students, 
can use it to log into our university 
accounts. But, it is also one of the 
things that one-third of the counties 
overseeing toss-up congressional 
elections don’t have access to. 
Internet-connected 
systems 
are 
just as vulnerable to hacking as 
voting machines, but email is such 
a mundane thing that it would be 
hard to find its place in an article 
talking about hackers undermining 
or saving democracy.
Throwing around the words 
“cybersecurity” 
and 
“hackers” 
instinctively brings to mind coders 
trying to solve an encryption. 
Cybersecurity, though, should not 
be regarded as solely a technology 

challenge. Harvard University’s 
Belfer Center for Science and 
International Affairs developed 
a checklist for managing cyber 
risks during political campaigns, 
but you probably won’t see that 
too often in the news. Having a 
report released on cyber risk mostly 
dealing with the “human element” 
in cybersecurity doesn’t seem to 
add anything new or shiny to tech 
coverage. Still, cyber risks mostly 
show up because we are human. 
Because some of the most common 
passwords people use are “123456” 
and “password.” Because we put 
our passwords into spear-phishing 
emails. Because we will sometimes 
share our passwords with the 
people we work with.
The way these conferences 
and journalists frame election 
cybersecurity and tech in general 
affects the perception graduates 
will have on their future tech jobs. 
We want jobs where we can work 
on these supposedly “new” issues 
and solve them with “shiny” codes 
and brilliant hackers. That’s why 
so many of us will want to work 
for Google, Facebook and all the 
other companies that dominate the 
press coverage of technology. In 
the meantime, political campaigns 
are getting hacked because there 
was no training in identifying a 
phishing email. In the meantime, 
counties are struggling to hire 
the people capable of dealing 
with all the emerging cyber risks, 
and people are probably hanging 
around DefCon, hacking supposed 
“election websites.”

Am I allowed to listen to love songs anymore?

JOEL DANILEWITZ | OP-ED

Anamaria Cuza can be reached at 

anacuza@umich.edu.

JILLIAN LI | CONTACT JILLIAN AT LIJILLI@UMICH.EDU

ALI SAFAWI | COLUMN

Let’s talk about pot
T

his 
November, 
Michiganders 
will 
be 
able to vote on Proposal 
1, 
which 
would 
legalize 
the 
possession, 
consumption 
and 
sale of marijuana for recreational 
purposes. In a recent survey from 
The Detroit News, 56 percent of 
likely voters supported Proposal 
1 and 36 percent opposed it, with 
only 6 percent undecided. Even 
opponents of legalization expect 
it to pass by a wide margin as 
voters, especially young voters, 
will be motivated to the polls by 
the spectacle of legalization. This 
is probably why the Republican 
Party in Lansing tried (and failed) 
to legalize marijuana in an effort 
to keep Proposal 1 off the ballot 
and tamp down on voter turnout 
in an election year that is looking 
increasingly bad for the GOP.
Recreational use of marijuana 
has been legalized in nine states 
and Washington, D.C. Thirteen 
other states and many of Michigan’s 
largest cities — including Ann 
Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids and 
Lansing — have decriminalized, 
but not legalized, recreational 
marijuana. 
Decriminalization 
means that someone caught with 
small amounts of marijuana will 
face a civil penalty, such as a 
fine, instead of criminal charges. 
Medical marijuana is also legal in 
Michigan, provided a person has 
one of 22 health conditions the 
state government has approved to 
qualify for treatment with medical 
marijuana, 
including 
autism, 
chronic pain and cancer. People 
with one of these conditions can 
apply for a state medical marijuana 
ID card.
While 
legalization 
and/or 
decriminalization of marijuana is a 
step forward in undoing the tangled 
mess that was the war on drugs, 
the hysteric anti-drug mindset of 
former Presidents Richard Nixon 
and Ronald Reagan still influences 
drug policy at the federal level. 
When Michigan votes to legalize 
recreational marijuana on Nov. 6, 
pot will still sit alongside heroin as 
a Schedule 1 controlled substance 
in the Drug Enforcement Agency’s 
eyes. In states like Colorado, where 
recreational marijuana is already 
legal, the mismatch between state 
and federal statutes means that 
while a person may be able to sell 
marijuana freely, they cannot open 
a bank account for their business. 
Comedian John Oliver does a 
great segment on this topic that I 
encourage everyone to watch.

But, 
I 
am 
not 
a 
legal 
columnist. With the legalization 
of recreational marijuana use in 
Michigan 
seeming 
inevitable, 
it’s high time we have a real 
discussion 
about 
the 
public 
health solutions and challenges 
posed by marijuana.
The properties of marijuana 
come from naturally-occurring 
chemicals 
in 
the 
plant 
that 
interact with the endocannabinoid 
system. The ECS is a system of 
cellular receptors in the nervous 
system that normally bind the 
neurotransmitters AEA and 2-AG. 
The chemicals in marijuana are 
similar enough in structure to 
AEA and 2-AG to bind to the ECS 
receptors and activate the system 
which plays a role in appetite, 
pain, memory and mood. The 
two most well-known chemicals 
in 
marijuana 
are 
THC, 
the 
psychoactive ingredient, and CBD 
though there are many more.
Marijuana has been touted to 
possess all sorts of health benefits, 
chief among them as a non-opioid 
treatment 
for 
chronic 
pain. 
Michigan is in the jaws of a massive 
opioid epidemic and marijuana 
is often mentioned in discourses 
about 
solutions. 
Theoretically, 
opioids and cannabinoids (the class 
of chemicals in marijuana) treat 
chronic pain in much the same 
way. While cannabinoids stimulate 
the ECS, opioids stimulate the 
body’s mu-opioid receptors. Both 
lead to changes in perception of 
the chronic pain. They do not 
treat the underlying cause of 
the pain (e.g. inflammation or 
damaged nerves). The key appeal 
of cannabinoids over opioids is that 
no one has died of an overdose on 
marijuana while thousands have 
overdosed on Oxycontin and 
other opioids. Despite this benefit 
and fairly solid evidence that 
cannabinoids can treat chronic 
pain, U.S. health care providers 
still prefer to prescribe opioids — 
a barrier that must be addressed 
if marijuana is to ever be widely 
used as an opioid alternative.
Marijuana has been shown to 
have other concrete health benefits, 
such as reducing vomiting in cancer 
patients and improving food intake 
in HIV-positive patients. However, 
there are also a fair number of 
fantastical claims out there about 
what pot can cure. Marijuana 
and its non-psychoactive cousin, 
hemp, have been shrouded in 
an aura of mysticism that leads 
some people to believe it can cure 

complex diseases such as cancer. 
The unfortunate truth is there is 
no evidence that marijuana cures 
or slows the course of cancer.
Health care providers, hospital 
and public health organizations in 
Michigan would do well to educate 
people about the reality of what 
marijuana can and cannot do, 
otherwise, we could see patients 
forgoing proper medical treatment 
and instead trying to smoke 
themselves, or their kids, healthy.
Speaking of smoking, let me 
bust one of the most common 
marijuana 
myths 
out 
there: 
Smoking pot is not harmless. 
While not as addictive as opioids, 
about 10 percent of chronic 
marijuana smokers will develop 
a dependence, with a higher 
likelihood 
of 
dependence 
the 
younger you are. Just like other 
substances, stopping marijuana 
can cause withdrawal that while 
not deadly, can make it hard for 
someone to quit if they want to. 
Smoking any burning plant matter, 
be it marijuana, tobacco or even 
lettuce, exposes a person to nasty 
chemicals produced by the burning 
process. Regular marijuana use 
is also linked to heart and lung 
problems as well as at least one 
type of cancer. 
None of this is to say that 
recreational 
marijuana 
should 
remain illegal, just that there is 
a need for widespread education 
about the risks of use when 
Michiganders gain far greater 
access to marijuana. Like alcohol 
and tobacco, marijuana will be 
tightly regulated under Proposal 1 
which should put minds at ease.
Proposal 1 is by no means 
perfect. It does not erase marijuana 
convictions of people, especially 
people 
of 
color, 
who 
have 
predominantly been incarcerated 
under the old war on drugs 
policies. That is the next step. 
When Proposal 1 passes by a hefty 
margin, which I think it will, it will 
also send a message to Congress to 
act to end the federal prohibition 
on marijuana.
The war on drugs was based 
on hysteria and racism, not public 
health concerns. Now that we are 
crawling out of this failed era, it is 
time we treat marijuana the way 
it should be: as a drug with real 
potential to benefit people’s lives, 
but also with some real risks that 
need to be properly mitigated.

Ali Safawi can be reached at 

asafawi@umich.edu.

— Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in an interview with 
Fox News in response to allegations of sexual assault

“

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

The vast majority of the time I 
spent in high school was studying or 
focused on sports and being a good 
friend to the boys and the girls that I 
was friends with. ”

Joel Danilewitz is a Seniot Opinion 

Editor and can be reached at joeldan@

umich.edu.