I expected the world to look different when I woke up last Wednesday. I don’t know exactly what I expected it to look like; perhaps I thought I would see catchy quotes lighting up the sky in bold pink font, proclaiming that the future is female and therefore that I am the future. Maybe I expected the sun to shine a little differently, to reflect on the crimson maple trees around campus so the leaves would glow like a thousand little stars and light my path as I walked down State Street to my economics lecture. For the past two years, I had been told Tuesday would be my chance to change the world. Instagram had been flooded with glossy images of feminism and intersectionality that promised a better life for us all if we would simply vote. We were told that if we voted on Tuesday, we would have a chance to paint America sparkly pink and wrap it up with a bow. We were told our fate was in our hands if we would just show up to the polls. So we showed up. We voted in record numbers. It was a groundbreaking election. We, as voters, decided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, Ilhan Omar will be the first Somali- American in Congress, Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland will be the first Native American women in Congress, and Letitia James will be the first African American woman to serve as New York’s attorney general, among several other decisions. We decided it’s finally time for over 100 women to serve in Congress. For a split second, I let myself get caught up in the hope and hype. I thought maybe when I woke up, things would look and feel at least a little different. Then, Wednesday night, more than a dozen people were brutally murdered on American soil simply for spending time at a country music bar. After 20 years of living in this country, I should have known better. I should have known the country has never been glossy and pink and hope always appears to be in vain. One of my good friends grew up near Thousand Oaks, Calif., which was the location of the shooting. I didn’t talk to her much about it, but I know she spent most of Thursday in mourning. Real people in Thousand Oaks — people with families and dreams to change the world — simply went out to enjoy their evening at a bar, and now they’re dead. Gone. Executed for committing the unforgivable crime of existing on American soil. On Friday, the same friend sent me a video of her neighbor’s house in California, engulfed in a blanket of sinister flames that danced with gleeful knowledge of the destruction they were causing. Historic wildfires have taken over the region, and have now killed more than 30 people. Thousands of families have lost their homes, and dozens have lost someone they love. How are we possibly supposed to find hope when there seems to be nothing but death from sea to shining sea? Personally I know of two activities that give me hope: When I’m loving kids and when I’m telling stories. It’s fairly simple, actually. I volunteer for two really great organizations: one for which I spend time with 10th graders in Detroit and one for which I hang out with middle school students in my hometown. To me, nothing beats being with these kids, hearing about their classes and career goals and their crushes. And telling stories – well, you can already see God gave me a love for words, and when I sit down and put them on paper, it just feels right, like all my confusing thoughts finally have a purpose. There’s nothing profound about either of those things, and they won’t put an end to mass tragedy, but they give me a small opportunity to make the world a little bit better, and when faced with that opportunity, I’m going to take it. As heartbroken as I am by the current state of our country, I am a proud American and I consider it my honor to perform my civic duties. I’m an informed voter and I’ve participated in multiple protests when voting didn’t seem to be enough. I actively reach out to my elected officials. If you’re an American and you don’t do those things, it’s high time to ask yourself why not. Nothing is going to change if we don’t demand change. But I have another civic duty, one that wasn’t listed in my Advanced Placement Government textbook: to sit in a middle school cafeteria and listen to 12-year-old girls complain about their gym classes. Every one of us has more civic duties. Some of us are called to improve the country by helping advance our computer systems, or to do research on cells, or to bring beauty to people’s lives through art. I beg of each and every one of you: Do what you were put on this planet to do. That’s your civic duty. You can’t singlehandedly prevent tragedy from ever occurring again, but there are plenty of things you can do to make this broken, hurting country a little bit more joyful. This isn’t a call to complacency, telling you to follow your dreams instead of fighting for change. Far from it, in fact. Please do everything you can to enact change in this world because we so desperately need it in more ways than I can begin to list in this column. My call, instead, is for you to remember though we may never see bold pink words engraved in the skies, though perhaps we will always find ourselves in a country of mass tragedy and heartbreak, we can never be stripped of our hope. There is always something we can do to make today a little bit better. And in two years’ time, when our fate is once more in our own hands, I hope we believe it, and show up to the polls again, and, despite everything, I hope we continue to vote in record numbers. T his experience we call college has the potential to be the most integral quest for self-discovery in our lives. Exalted in popular imagination as a wild, inspiring and fulfilling era, adults often reminisce on their college years with a wistful smile. This is because people in college are afforded the freedom of adulthood without its consequential responsibility. Yes, many students work and pay their way through college, and some have to sacrifice a lot to make college happen, but few wrestle with the true pressures and entanglements of adulthood like raising a child, nurturing a marriage, and paying taxes and mortgages for an entire family. By its very design, college can be an inherently selfish time. You set off on your own adventure and find out what’s important to you and who you are. You’re constantly concerning yourself with what classes you’re going to take, who you’re going to develop relationships with or what organizations you’re going to participate in across campus. There’s the danger that you might develop a routine blindness to the people who brought you to college in the first place: your parents. By parents I don’t just mean biological parents. Perhaps you were influenced more by your grandparents or a teacher or community organizer (further references to “parents” herein indicate the people or person who raised, mentored or otherwise supplied you with the building blocks from which you constructed yourself). A parent can take many forms, but whoever they are, there’s a chance you’ve become numb to their struggles in your constant juggling of the new and exciting. “They didn’t get me into college! I did through hard work and determination,” you might assert. As a matter of fact some people at college even have an unfortunately adversarial relationship with the people who raised them because of past complication or hardship. The important truth to recognize here is regardless of the tone of your relationship with your parents, they still represent the order around which you oriented yourself in the world. Whether someone has a close and loving or contentious and distant relationship with their parents — the philosophy of life that you’ve inherited from them is your familiar anchor in the world, the truth from which you go out and explore. Whether you consciously realize it, those elements are the very things that stabilize your life. Discovery, the new and uncharted, is chaos. That’s where learning comes from, exposing yourself to something beyond order so that you might incorporate it into yourself and expand. Too much chaos, and your life might fall out of balance. Too little, and you’ll never learn, grow or change. But how do you embrace the chaos without throwing the order your parents gave you out the window? How do you create your own values without desecrating the ones your parents instilled in you? How do you discover yourself without leaving them behind? Start by trying to understand and appreciate the kind of order your parents have given you. Partly as a function of our mutual respect, effective communication and openness, I’ve been fortunate in my relationship with my parents. Their order has helped instill in me values that allow me to make sound judgments and balance the temptations and opportunities presented to me as a young person living away from home. One ingredient of this order is my parents’ conscientiousness. My dad organizes his briefcase and closet every night before work. He arms each pocket and drawer with a toolbox of materials for nearly every situation: a backup pair of headphones and medicine for a theoretical future cold. It’s the doomsday prepper of briefcases, a trait accumulated from a lifetime of being prepared to face chaos for him and his family. My mom, too, has a specialization in making our home feel perpetually organized, comfortable and safe. It isn’t just tidiness. My mom is establishing order in our house so that those who enter know that this is a place safe from the chaos of the world, that this is a home in the truest sense of the word. Opinion The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4 —Thursday, November 15, 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 HANNAH HARSHE | COLUMN Hope amid tragedy Integrating parents into the college experience MILES STEPHENSON | COLUMN Hannah Harshe can be reached at hharshe@umich.edu Miles Stephenson can be reached at mvsteph@umich.edu. The joint campaign’s ethos is “Whether you or someone you know is struggling, there are counseling services available to everyone at the university … We’re here for you.” U-M mental health service providers also expressed the hope that this campaign will open up the campus to new conversations about mental and emotional health. As students, most of our mental health falls under the guidance of CAPS. Mental health on college campuses is a critical issue. A 2016-17 report from Healthy Minds, a national network that surveys the mental health of U.S. college students, shows 31 percent of students have depression, 31 percent have elevated levels of generalized anxiety and 11 percent have had suicidal ideation in the past year. Suicide is the second leading killer of Americans ages 10-34. These alarming statistics highlight the need for comprehensive mental health services on college campuses. We applaud CAPS and other campus organizations for attempting to bring more awareness to the available mental health resources for students. One resource we would particularly like to see this joint campaign promote is the embedded counselor program run through CAPS. While many students may not be aware of it, 13 U-M units, such as the College of Engineering, the School of Public Health and the Ford School of Public Policy, have their own dedicated mental health provider available to students. These embedded counselors have their offices not in the main CAPS space but in the academic unit itself. For instance, a Public Policy student would be able to see their embedded counselor at their office in Weill Hall. The embedded model was actually started in four of the North Campus colleges in 2014 and we feel that, despite the general lack of awareness among students, this is a good model. CAPS would do well to highlight their embedded counselors and expand the program to other academic units such as LSA, which does not currently have its own. CAPS has developed a bad reputation among some University students due to long wait times and the feeling that students are not getting the help they need. While we hear these concerns and will continue to urge CAPS to cut down wait times, we also must acknowledge CAPS is meant to serve as a first-step on the road to good mental health and not the cure-all some students may expect it to be. While we endorse this new awareness campaign, we also call on CAPS to improve their services. As previously mentioned, long waits are a serious barrier to students wishing to access care. We also have concerns with stories of students feeling forced away from CAPS and toward community providers. While we recognize CAPS operates under a short-term treatment model and it may not be able to provide the specialized care needed to address some mental health problems such as eating disorders, pushing students toward community providers presents problems of access. Unlike CAPS, community providers can be prohibitively expensive without good health insurance and many students without a car could have a hard time traveling to appointments. We encourage CAPS to explore innovative solutions to improve access to mental health services among the student population. Potential options could include a fully staffed CAPS office on North Campus and providing teletherapy as an alternative to in-person counseling. The joint campaign should also promote Wolverine Wellness and the Wolverine Support Network, two non-CAPS mental health interventions. The joint awareness campaign initiated by three of the University’s counseling offices is a step in the right direction. However, promoting resources without actively working to improve them would be a wasted opportunity. FROM THE DAILY New U campaign is promising T his week, three University of Michigan counseling offices announced a new joint campaign to increase awareness of and access to mental health services for students, faculty and staff. The University’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), Faculty and Staff Counseling and Consultation Office (FASCCO) along with Michigan Medicine’s Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience together provide no-cost counseling to the majority of the campus community. We encourage CAPS to explore innovative solutions CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor and op-eds. Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to tothedaily@michigandaily.com. JOIN OUR EDITORIAL BOARD Our Editorial Board meets Mondays and Wednesdays 7:15-8:45 PM at our newsroom at 420 Maynard Street. All are welcome to come discuss national, state and campus affairs. HANNAH HARSHE By its very design, college can be an inherently selfish time Read more at MichiganDaily.com