Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, March 29, 2019

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Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. 
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JULIANNA MORANO | VIEWPOINTS

Recognizing the realities of the false shooter alert
W

hen asked about my 
experience with the 
active 
shooter 
scare 
last Saturday, I compress it into a 
few sentences: My roommate and 
I were in the Diag for the vigil. We 
got separated and had no way of 
contacting one another. We both 
spent two hours wondering if the 
other had been shot. But it was more 
than that truncation. It was realer 
than those few clauses suggest. So 
here, I retell our story: 
For 40 minutes, we mourn. My 
roommate and I meet each other in 
the Diag to attend the vigil in honor 
of the men, women and children who 
were killed at the Al Noor Mosque 
and Linwood Islamic Center in 
Christchurch, New Zealand. Some 
of us hold hands, many hold back 
tears and speakers much braver 
than I am choke over the names of 
people killed in the past decade by 
white supremacist terrorism. We 
bow our heads. We witness cries of 
terrible grief and cries of rallying, 
unbelievable power. We are together.
In a split second, we are driven 
apart. It appears as though panic 
travels in a wave, bodies farthest 
from me remaining upright, fleeing, 
and bodies closer to me ducking, 
hitting the ground, both willfully 
and unwillfully. I process this wave, 
this relative motion, because at first 
I do not move. Later, I will question 
my reflexes in this moment. While 
actual seconds lapsed before I 
responded to the imperative run, it 
took no time at all for me to accept 
that it was happening, that we were 
under attack. To think, yes, of course 
it would happen right now. We have 
been waiting our turn. To rationalize, 
yes, of course it would be here. They 
would target us for mourning. They 
would kill us for demanding memory, 
demanding action, demanding a 

world without massacre.
When I do finally manage to run, 
I fall, too. As I stand back up after 
collapsing, I realize I do not know 
where my roommate who I came 
with, mourned with, is. I look around. 
How could so many people vanish? 
Why did they tell us to run toward 
Mason Hall and then away? Why 
didn’t I grab her hand, why didn’t I 
grab her hand, why didn’t I grab her 
hand … 
I return to the Diag. People seize 
the microphone — used minutes 
earlier to eulogize, to give speeches, to 
deliver poems — and initiate searches 
for people who got lost in the chaos. 
One of the brave students who voiced 
one of the mournful, rallying cries 
asks me if I’ve seen a little boy with a 
camouflage jacket. Later that week, I 
will see this same student walking to 
a classroom in Mason. I will stop and 
try not to stare at him, at this person 
who had no concern for himself, 
concerned himself solely with the 
recovery of a stranger’s child. All I can 
croak out to him in the moment is a 
sorrowful “No.”
I try to reach her. Two phone 
calls, no answer. They are telling us 
to seek shelter in the Harlan Hatcher 
Library. I redial. I redial. “Hello?” on 
the fourth. I inhale; I am buying time, 
and in that bought time, I pretend I 
don’t know it’s not her voice. I exhale, 
“Hey.” I gulp, “Where are you?” The 
person with the voice that is not my 
roommate’s tells me she is sitting 
on a bench inside Hatcher. She has 
collected phones that were dropped 
when people started running. I 
think I am still exhaling when I see 
the person who is not my roommate 
and pick up my roommate’s phone. I 
cannot reach her, I cannot reach her, 
I cannot reach her…
For two hours, I am without her. 
For 16 phone calls, I am in a desperate, 

pleading, relentless search of her. For 
a quarter of them I am crying. People 
on the other end of the line remind me 
to breathe. A stranger in the library 
rubs my back when I start crying 
and, whenever they move us between 
floors of Hatcher and escort us past 
police officers holding the largest 
weapons I have ever seen in person, 
they ensure I keep moving. Later, I 
will process these sacrifices people 
made for my sanity. I will marvel at 
the endless capacity to give that some 
people have, even in these scenarios 
that try to take all that you have.
During the last of these 16 phone 
calls, I am back where I started. We 
have been told that they have cleared 
the libraries and the Diag. People 
are going home. I contemplate aloud 
whether I should follow suit; I feel 
a need to stay in the place I last saw 
her and wait for her to come back, 
but the friend speaking on the phone 
with me tells me I should go home. 
I hesitate and look back to the last 
place I saw my roommate when I see 
another piece of her: her backpack. 
I rush over, pick it up, and decide, 
yes, I will go home. I will carry her 
phone and mine, her backpack and 
mine, bringing these small pieces 
of her to her. I will tell myself she is 
already home, wondering where I am. 
Later, I still will avoid the thoughts 
I was avoiding then. I will swallow 
hard at the thought of seeing the text 
messages on her phone, friends and 
relatives asking if she was okay, that 
I could not answer. At the thought of 
carrying pieces of her and wondering 
if I would see the whole her again.

T

he United States has 
a lot of strengths as a 
nation. It’s in a large, 
resource-rich and geographically 
advantageous location — isolated 
from potential threats by great 
oceans. 
Despite 
exorbitant 
education costs, it is still home to 
the vast majority of the world’s best 
higher-learning institutions. It has 
the oldest, and one of the most 
impressive, constitutions in the 
world. Thanks to these factors, and 
a host of others, the United States 
is a global superpower. However, 
the United States’ foreign policy, 
both historically and in the 
present day, has done nothing 
but undermine the United States’ 
tactical and economic strengths, 
hindering its ability to act as a 
world leader. U.S. foreign policy 
in the 20th and 21st centuries has 
hurt international development 
and growth, as well as the United 
States’ own standing in global 
geopolitics. Through an aversion 
to multilateral cooperation, the 
United States has disregarded 
alliances it could (and should) have 
utilized, irritating other nations 
and diminishing its own power. 
As China and other nations rapidly 
develop, it’s time for the U.S. to 
make a long-overdue foreign policy 
shift from an adversarial lone wolf 
to a cooperative coalition leader.
Perhaps nothing embodies the 
United States’ adverse relationship 
with multilateralism more than the 
League of Nations. In the wake of 
World War I, President Woodrow 
Wilson (correctly) theorized that 
a large organization promoting 
international 
cooperation 
was 
needed in order to maintain 
lasting global peace. With this 
in mind, Wilson introduced the 
idea of a “general association of 
nations,” an organization aimed at 
both resolving inter-state disputes 
diplomatically 
and 
preventing 
war through collective security. 
At the Paris Peace Conference in 
1919, Wilson was able to convince 
nations around the world to join, 
and, on Nov. 1, 1920, 41 nations 
convened in Geneva for the League 
of Nations’ inaugural session.
There was only one problem: The 
United States was not one of the 41 
nations present. Despite creating 
the League of Nations himself, 
Wilson was unable to convince a 
stubborn, isolationist U.S. Senate 
to agree to join. While the League 
of Nations was not designed to be 
particularly strong — for instance, 
it lacked armed forces with which 
to enforce its decrees — the 
United States’ decision not to join 
rendered the organization useless. 
Understanding how irrelevant and 
powerless the League of Nations 
was, Germany and Japan both 
withdrew in 1933, and six years 
later, Wilson’s worst fears were 
realized: Unable to cooperate, 
nations around the world had 
once again plunged into conflict 
alongside the rise of Adolf Hitler. 
Following the Second World 
War, it seemed that the United 
States 
had 
finally 
begun 
to 
understand 
the 
benefits 
of 
multilateralism. The U.S. became 
a founding member of the North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization in 
1949 and appeared willing to work 
with its Western European allies. 

However, less than 20 years after 
joining NATO, the U.S. began to 
(again) ignore the desires of its 
own allies, much to their chagrin. 
At the 1964 North Atlantic Council 
Meeting, the United States had 
attempted to convince its NATO 
allies to launch an offensive 
against Vietnamese communists. 
However, the U.S.’s European allies 
declined, criticizing the mission as 
an unwinnable war in an area they 
did not see as a major threat and as 
one that would only take resources 
away from defending their own 
borders. Undeterred by NATO’s 
resounding disapproval, the U.S. 
deployed troops to Vietnam in 1965, 
beginning a lengthy and fruitless 
U.S. military campaign. Harlan 
Cleveland, the U.S. representative 
for NATO, even admitted the U.S. 
viewed itself as above the alliance, 
saying the U.S.’s approach to 
working with NATO primarily 
consisted of “consent building 
notifications after the event.” 
Ultimately, the U.S. left Vietnam 
in 1975 after an unsuccessful and 
drawn-out campaign, which had 
done nothing but antagonize their 
own allies and destabilize the 
United States’ relationships.
Thanks to the collapse of the 
Soviet Union in 1991, a mere 16 
years after the Vietnam debacle 
had concluded, the United States 
became, indisputably, the most 
powerful nation in the world. 
Despite this golden opportunity 
to promote peace and prosperity 
around the globe, it only took 
the U.S. until 2003 to once again 
bewilder and enrage its own 
allies. In February of that year, 
Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary 
of State, delivered a speech to the 
United Nations Security Council 
advocating for an invasion of Iraq, 
based on the false claim Iraq had 
weapons of mass destruction. 
With the exception of the United 
Kingdom, all U.S. allies staunchly 
disagreed with the invasion. In 
response to the U.S.’s plan, French 
Foreign 
Minister 
Dominique 
de Villepin said, “We think that 
military intervention would be the 
worst possible solution.” Germany 
agreed with France’s assessment, 
and French President Jacques 
Chirac said he and German 
Chancellor 
Gerhard 
Schröder 
would do everything they could to 
prevent a conflict. Backed only by 
the U.K., the U.S. decided to invade 
Iraq anyway, resulting in a war that 
destabilized the region horribly, 
killed more than 650,000 people 
and found no weapons of mass 
destruction. Once again, the U.S. 
had gone against the wishes of its 
own allies, acting not like a global 
leader, but rather an overzealous 
war machine.
Even today, the consequences 
of the U.S.’s aversion towards 
collaboration 
have 
direct 
consequences on world affairs and 
hinder American effectiveness. 
For example, the U.S. recently 
sent aid to Venezuela to help the 
country’s deprived citizens during 
the nation’s period of mass unrest. 
Seizing on the U.S.’s history of 
politically 
motivated 
foreign 
aid missions in the Americas 
and politically charged tweets 
by President Donald Trump’s 
administration, 
Venezuelan 

President 
Nicolás 
Maduro 
justified blocking the aid, saying 
it was intended to prop up his 
opponent, Juan Guaidó. Whether 
or not the U.S. had genuinely 
been acting in good faith (which 
is highly debatable), Maduro had 
successfully 
used 
the 
United 
States’ past actions as an excuse to 
limit aid to his own people.
However, no current issue 
highlights the world’s desperate 
need for a cooperative U.S. more 
than climate change. In 2016, 195 
nations around the world signed off 
on the Paris climate agreement, an 
agreement aimed at limiting (and 
eventually reducing) the emission 
of greenhouse gases. Crucially, 
the Paris agreement relies on 
the good faith of the member 
nations: It is up to each country to 
determine how they plan to limit 
their greenhouse gas emissions. 
Unsurprisingly, different nations 
showed varying levels of intent 
— Nicaragua initially didn’t even 
ratify the agreement, arguing 
it didn’t go far enough. On the 
other end of the spectrum is the 
United 
States. 
Despite 
being 
the second biggest producer of 
carbon dioxide (and the biggest 
per capita producer), the United 
States withdrew from the Paris 
agreement in 2017, with Trump 
saying it would undermine the U.S. 
economy. With an opportunity to 
take the lead on a critical global 
issue, the United States decided to 
shirk responsibility, ignoring the 
destructive consequences of its 
actions.
Unfortunately for the U.S., 
rectifying their past missteps in 
foreign policy will be a difficult 
task that cannot be completed 
overnight. However, the U.S. 
can still begin by displaying a 
fundamental change in attitude. 
The U.S. may have a larger military 
than its allies, or a bigger economy, 
but neither of those factors justify 
continually 
strong-arming 
our 
allies, 
something 
the 
United 
States should acknowledge and 
apologize for. Going forward, 
the United States should rejoin 
the Paris climate agreement and 
UNESCO and stop constantly 
antagonizing its own allies. An 
overhaul of U.S. foreign relations 
doesn’t 
necessarily 
need 
to 
involve introducing new large-
scale international treaties, but 
rather simply working with the 
nations the U.S. claims to already 
be allied with and fulfilling its 
responsibilities on global issues 
such as climate change. Ultimately, 
the U.S. has not thrived because 
of an aggressive, individualistic 
foreign policy, but rather in spite 
of it.
While the Trump administration 
will surely not be the one that fixes 
this, that doesn’t mean the situation 
is a lost cause. Hopefully, the United 
States’ future leaders will work 
collaboratively with leaders around 
the globe to form coalitions aimed 
at promoting peace and prosperity, 
understanding the things that 
benefit both the United States and 
the world as a whole.

A foreign policy of collaboration

Zack Blumberg can be reached at 

zblumber@umich.edu.

Zack Blumberg
Emma Chang
Joel Danilewitz
Emily Huhman
Tara Jayaram

Jeremy Kaplan
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Ethan Kessler
Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Alex Satola
Timothy Spurlin
Nicholas Tomaino
Erin White 
Ashley Zhang

ZACK BLUMBERG | COLUMN

B

orn in the last year of the 
“Disney Renaissance,” I 
grew up watching animated 
childhood tales with my family. 
Far from mindless cartoons, these 
films explored meaning through 
narratives of love, betrayal, coming 
of age and more — solidifying 
themselves as archetypal stories 
for entire generations. In no small 
terms, these animated films are 
often the preeminent means of 
social education for young children. 
They tell young, eager minds how 
to be happy, how to treat friends, 
how to treat the opposite sex, how 
to find meaning, how to behave 
toward parents and how to grow 
up. They orient the minds of 
children to the way of doing things 
here in the Western world. Clinical 
psychologist 
Jordan 
Peterson 
examines these archetypes in “The 
Little Mermaid”, “Sleeping Beauty”, 
“The Lion King”, “Pinocchio” and 
other classics in his lectures at 
the University of Toronto. After 
analyzing the fundamental hero 
myth in “Beauty and the Beast” 
during a segment on a news talk 
show, Peterson said, “A story is 
something that you can’t contrive. 
It has to manifest itself in some 
sense. The story has an internal 
logic. If you’re aiming it at a moral 
statement, then it’s not art, it’s 
propaganda, and it’ll fall flat.”
As I got older, animation had 
less of an impact on my beliefs, and 
aside from a few wildly imaginative 
stories like Studio Ghibli’s “Princess 
Mononoke”, Laika’s “Kubo and the 
Two Strings”, and Pixar’s “Up” 
and “The Incredibles”, I began to 
see animation as a sort of passive 
entertainment: bright stimulating 
colors, humorous sound effects and 
a simple three-act structure. The 
colloquialism of Saturday-morning 
cartoons lends this expendable, 
shallow classification to animation, 
something a parent might put on 
in the background to distract their 
three-year-old 
while 
dressing 
them. I began to look exclusively 
at live-action cinema for dramatic 
stories and when a new blockbuster 
animation headlined the marquee 
at my local theater (as with “Wreck-
It Ralph” and “Moana”), I always 
left underwhelmed.
My mindset changed last week 
when I saw “Spider-Man: Into the 
Spider-Verse.” First, there was the 
“living painting” style of animation 
that mixed line work, painting, 
dots and other comic book visual 
techniques to make it appear hand-
crafted, “Achieved by artists taking 
rendered frames from the CGI 
animators and working on top of 
them in 2D.” This brilliant work 
could lead a viewer to believe that 
Spider-Man, a nimble, squishy 

acrobat suspended in webs, and 
his story were made for animation. 
Then 
there 
was 
the 
superb 
soundtrack that sampled from 
some of the biggest rap and hip-
hop names in the world including 
Aminé, Juice Wrld, Lil Wayne, 
Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, Swae 
Lee and XXXTentacion, aiding 
the animation with its involved 
and energetic rhythm. But what 
fascinated me the most about 
“Spider-Verse” was its portrayal 
of changing social identities in a 
modern world.
To start, this film’s protagonist 
and central Spider-Man, Miles 
Morales, is the son of a Puerto Rican 
nurse and African-American cop. In 
the franchise’s last three iterations, 
Spider-Man was played by a young 
white guy, informing the audience 
with a cultural lens unique to that 
identity. Now, with Miles, Spider-
Man can be something different. 
Aside from a positive stride in racial 
representation in cinema, following 
the efforts of “Black Panther” in 
allowing young people of color to 
identify more closely with their 
favorite superheroes, Spider-Man’s 
new non-white identity brings 
something fresh to the story. This 
Spider-Man is different, current 
and compelling: He has a new 
passion, taste in music, vernacular, 
group 
of 
friends 
and 
family 
dynamic, reinvigorating a classic 
story with a new lens. These traits 
are not so much tied to Miles’ race 
but are necessarily informed by the 
cultural implications of growing 
up as a person of color in New York 
City. Miles spray paints art murals 
with his uncle in the subway, listens 
to Post Malone while doing his 
homework and exchanges Spanish 
terms of endearment with his 
bilingual mother. An article by The 
Washington Post further examines 
these intersectional identities. The 
article describes Miles Morales’ arc 
as the following:
“The recognition that you are a 
freak; the isolation of the closet; the 
discovery of freaks like you, who 
might come to stand in for biological 
family; the play of identification and 
shame within a stigmatized group, 
of revulsion and self-acceptance, 
initiation and competition; turning 
freakishness into a weapon against 
adversity; and perhaps the eventual 
reintegration — of some part of 
yourself — into mainstream society, 
or at least into the family.”
The article argues that despite 
Miles’ heterosexual identity, the 
story resembles the stages of a 
coming-out story, paralleling his 
secret superhero identity with 
that of a closeted gay person. Later 
in the film, we’re introduced to a 
quasi-anime animation style with 

Japanese-American Peni Parker 
and her telepathic Spider-Bot, an 
alternate version of Spider-Man. 
This isn’t “diversity equals good” 
storytelling but instead a modern 
way to link the story of Spider-
Man to contemporary experiences 
of not only Asian and homosexual 
identities but of all people. In 
this way, “Spider-Verse” invites 
all audiences to connect and see 
themselves as the protagonist: a 
superhero. As the world continues 
to become more interconnected 
through film, and the stories of 
marginalized populations find the 
spotlight, “Spider-Verse” seeks to 
make room in an American story 
for the new voices in the room.
There are times when this well-
intended, progressive portrayal of 
identities seems a bit contrived. In 
the final act, Miles and his team 
of interdimensional Spider-People 
attempt to disrupt the villain 
Kingpin’s nuclear supercollider. 
In his final goodbyes to his team, 
Miles addresses Gwen Stacy, who 
up until this point in the film has 
been treated as a love interest, with 
an extended handshake. “Friends?” 
he asks. “Friends,” she agrees. 
Screen Rant writes that the story 
of the sequel “... will be focused on 
the romantic relationship between 
Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, 
which is a thread from executive 
producer and co-writer Phil Lord’s 
original script for the first movie.” 
And yet, this movie attempts to 
shoehorn a “not-all-female-leads-
must-be-love-interests” 
lesson 
into the same story that, for the 
last hour and a half, framed Gwen 
and Miles’ relationship as the 
embarrassing and flirtatious high-
school romance. A moment that 
tried to help viewers check their 
subconscious 
classification 
of 
the attractive female lead as 
necessarily filling the role of 
the romantic interest, which 
albeit is a valid meta-criticism of 
superhero tropes, felt awkward 
and out of character for both 
Miles and Gwen.
Aside from this infrequent 
faux pas, the film expertly 
addresses a modern audience by 
placing social identities at the 
heart of this Spider-Man, Spider-
Woman, and Spider-Robot story. 
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-
Verse” pushes the boundaries of 
animation and reimagines the 
mid-century superhero comic 
to include the conversations of 
today, and for these reasons, it 
returns archetypal stories to the 
realm of animation.

Indentities in animation

MILES STEPHENSON | COLUMN

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.
Miles Stephenson can be reached at 

mvsteph@umich.edu.

Julianna Morano is a sophomore at the 

University of Michigan and a writer for the 

Arts section of The Michigan Daily. 

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

