Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, April 22, 2019

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L

ike 
countless 
people 
from around the globe, 
I 
watched 
in 
horror 
as a terrible fire ravaged the 
irreplaceable 
Notre 
Dame 
Cathedral in Paris on April 
15. As the damage unfolded, 
I found myself transfixed to 
whatever screen was in front of 
me, watching the same images 
of fire and destruction over and 
over again. At some point during 
the day, I started to question 
why I was mired in grief over 
the devastation of a cathedral I 
seemingly had little connection to 
as a non-Christian American.
It’s this universal sense of 
loss for humanity, however, that 
illuminates the essence of Notre 
Dame. The cathedral is a symbol 
for spirituality and togetherness 
that transcends time, space and 
ideology. While part of what was 
lost in the fire is gone forever, it’s 
important to remember that the 
cathedral is more than the sum of 
its stone and timber. The process 
of rebuilding Notre Dame gives us 
an opportunity to renew not only 
the structure of Notre Dame, but 
the values it stands for as well.
The Notre Dame Cathedral is 
one of the earliest and grandest 
examples of Medieval Gothic 
architecture, built over a century 
on the Seine River island of Île de 
la Cité. Notre Dame has stood out 
among other Gothic cathedrals, 
utilizing a revolutionary flying 
buttress support system to soar 
to 35 meters high, taller than any 
Catholic church before it. The 
cathedral’s Gothic architecture 
has awed those in its presence 
for the past 850 years, bringing 
worshippers closer to the heavens 
above and minimizing their size in 
the presence of God. Abbot Suger, 
one of the earliest proponents of 
Gothic architecture, described 
the effects of the jeweled altar 
as such: “When … the loveliness 
of the many-coloured gems has 
called me away from external 
cares … and that, by the grace of 
God, I can be transported from 
this inferior to that higher world 
in an anagogical manner.”
Adding 
to 
Notre 
Dame’s 
distinction 
as 
a 
cultural 
monument, the cathedral has 
played host to a great deal of 
Europe’s storied history. Among 
many historic events at Notre 
Dame, Henry VI of England 
was crowned king there in 1431, 

Napoleon 
crowned 
himself 
emperor there in 1804 and Pope 
Pius X beatified Joan of Arc 
there in 1909. It’s these historical 
events that have solidified Notre 
Dame’s role in our culture as a 
place where any person, even 
the most powerful, stands small 
before God, acknowledging the 
inferiority of our world compared 
with the heavens above.
As part of Notre Dame’s 
intriguing history, the cathedral 
has been subjected to vandalism 
and neglect. During the French 
Revolution, the cathedral was 
targeted by vandals and renamed 
the “Temple to the Goddess 
Reason” 
by 
a 
revolutionary 
state hostile to the Catholic 
Church and religion in general. 
Additonally, worshippers at Notre 
Dame paid tribute to a woman 
posing as the goddess of reason, 
mocking the Catholic faith. The 
targeting of Notre Dame by anti-
Catholic zealots only solidified 
the cathedral’s lasting role as a 
universal symbol for God’s grace 
on earth.
Even 
though 
Napoleon 
returned Notre Dame back to 
the Catholic Church following 
the revolutionary period, the 
building was in a state of disrepair 
by the early to mid-19th century. 
French poet and novelist Victor 
Hugo brought the cathedral’s 
dilapidated 
condition 
to 
the 
public’s attention with his popular 
historical novel “The Hunchback 
of Notre Dame” in 1831. With 
that book, the enduring legend 
of Quasimodo, the hunchback 
of Notre Dame, was born along 
with renewed public interest 
in maintaining the cathedral. 
The renewed interest led to a 
major restoration project in the 
mid-19th century by the French 
architect 
Eugène-Emmanuel 
Viollet-le-Duc. It was during this 
restoration that Notre Dame’s 
now iconic spire was added on to 
the structure. This substantial 
alteration illustrates part of Notre 
Dame’s physical transformation 
through the centuries, never 
losing its core meaning along the 
way.
With Notre Dame restored 
to glory in the mid-19th century, 
the cathedral was again ready to 
set the scene for history during 
the liberation of Paris in 1944. 
The area directly in front of 
Notre Dame saw heavy fighting 

during a major uprising of French 
resistance 
fighters 
against 
occupying Nazi soldiers. When 
Allied forces finally liberated 
Paris, crowds rejoiced in front of 
Notre Dame as the cathedral bells 
rang, signifying a free France. 
With the liberation of Paris, Notre 
Dame again claimed a central 
role in European history. It’s this 
history as a place where humanity 
meets the heavens that makes 
Notre Dame an icon, irrespective 
of 
physical 
changes 
to 
the 
structure over the years.
Notre 
Dame’s 
legendary 
status as a backdrop to history 
and monument to the heavens 
makes this week’s devastating 
fire difficult to process. While 
it appears that much of Notre 
Dame’s religious relics and art 
survived the fire, the losses are 
still immense. The cathedral lost 
most of its roof made of original 
13th century timber, known as 
“the forest” for the sheer number 
of trees cut down for the wooden 
latticework. The soaring Notre 
Dame spire, an iconic element of 
Paris’ skyline, also succumbed to 
the flames.
Despite 
the 
devastating 
damage, 
French 
President 
Emmanuel Macron has pledged to 
rebuild the Notre Dame cathedral 
to its former glory in 5 years. 
While Notre Dame will never be 
quite the same, its next chapter 
has the potential to live up to its 
illustrious history. With societal 
changes such as globalization 
and migration roiling the fabric 
of Western culture, the ideals of 
Notre Dame are more important 
than ever. More than a simple 
structure, Notre Dame is a 
symbol for what human beings 
can accomplish when we put 
our differences aside and work 
together for a higher purpose. 
The soaring proportions of Notre 
Dame remind us all that, no matter 
our worldly stature, we pale in 
comparison to a higher power. 
These universal ideals cannot 
be destroyed by fire. Instead, we 
have an opportunity to live up to 
the meaning of Notre Dame by 
putting aside our differences and 
working together as one to rebuild 
it. In doing so, we will only add to 
the legacy of Notre Dame as the 
cathedral rises out of the ashes.

ABBIE BERRINGER | COLUMN

What if I become a stay-at-home mom?
I 

have always been raised on a 
path toward a successful, full-
time career. My parents and 
I have talked about it since I was 
young. I am the oldest daughter with 
only one other sibling who was very 
ill for much of her childhood, so as a 
kid I spent a lot of time as my parents’ 
sole helper. Living on a farm, there 
was never a shortage of work to be 
done, and I was expected to pull my 
weight and do a good job. “We have 
to go fix the fence” is still a phrase 
that haunts an occasional nightmare. 
My parents taught me that I could 
do any work I put my mind to and 
always wanted me to be successful. 
As I began to excel in school they 
challenged me to pursue my dreams 
and always pushed me to go to college 
and to have a career someday.
Yet as I went into my sophomore 
year of college, the decision to pursue 
a full-time career began to weigh 
on me. I had spent the past year 
working with first-grade students 
at an elementary school in Ypsilanti 
through the America Reads program 
and felt an immense amount of 
satisfaction from the relationships I 
created with them. This experience 
helped me to realize how much I 
truly yearn for a family someday, 
and thus I began to face the gnawing 
question of what type of mother I 
wanted to be.
All of a sudden I began to ask 
myself: Would I feel more fulfilled 
staying at home with my kids, if 
financially possible? Would I feel 
more fulfilled being there with them 
through every milestone in their 
youth, being the one to teach them 
to walk, talk, read and write? While 
I know so many wonderful working 
mothers, and know many children 
raised by two working parents who 
admire them immensely and are 
proud of all the skills they gained 
from that lifestyle, I began to wonder 
if trying to work full-time and raise a 
family would be right for me or would 
create the kind of family dynamic 
that I want to have as an adult.
My 
mother 
stayed 
home 
with my sister and I most of our 
childhood, but as we entered high 
school she re-entered the workforce. 
This dynamic completely changed 
how our family functioned. Even 
with all of us picking up more of 
the workload at home with chores, 
cooking and cleaning, things weren’t 
the same. Now both of our parents 
came home tired, more irritable and 
distracted after long days of work, 

missed some of our extracurricular 
events and couldn’t always answer 
our phone calls or be around on 
weekends. The feelings associated 
with this change were no doubt 
accentuated by a lifetime of taking all 
that my mother did for us at home for 
granted. Yet as I looked back, I began 
to reflect on how fundamental she 
was throughout all of the seemingly 
mundane day-to-day parts of my 
childhood.
During my infancy, she read 
and talked to me constantly as she 
went about her day. As I grew older 
she was able to make me healthy 
homemade lunches, drop me off 
at school and pick me up if I got 
injured or sick. She sat with me 
through hours of homework, took 
my sister and I on fun adventures 
in the summertime and we read 
books all the time. Because of her 
influence, I began watching the 
news and became invested in politics 
long before I finished elementary 
school. I’ve always known that she 
fueled my passion for history and 
politics through her own, but I never 
stopped to consider how different 
my childhood could have been if she 
had been working 40-hour weeks 
just like my dad all that time. While 
many modern childcare providers 
provide excellent education and care 
for young children, if one can afford 
it (and that is a big if), I feel that these 
benefits couldn’t have replaced the 
strong relationship I developed with 
my mother or the family values she 
cultivated in me everyday.
Studies have found that children 
“who spend long hours in child care 
may experience more stress and 
are at increased risk of becoming 
overly aggressive and developing 
other behavior problems.” While 
competing studies have shown that 
there may be benefits for children 
of 
working 
parents, 
especially 
daughters of working mothers, due to 
increased independence and having 
a working mother as a positive role 
model, others have continued to 
question the importance of the role 
of a stay-at-home parent. The better 
economic situation of having two 
incomes can often benefit a child’s 
education, while the lack of parental 
attention can lead to feelings of 
neglect and troubled inter-family 
relationships later on in a child’s life.
All of this conflicting literature, 
however, hasn’t changed how I feel 
about potentially staying home with 
my kids. My only fear is that if I make 

the choice to stay home, I will lose the 
respect of many of the career women 
around me. Even on campus I have 
heard many young women make 
negative comments about stay-at-
home mothers that concern me when 
I consider that these peers will be the 
women that surround me as an adult 
as well.
My mother faced the scrutiny 
and judgment of career women in our 
communities who treated her as if 
her life was easy and raising kids full-
time wasn’t a respectable choice. She 
was scolded by women around her 
as if she were a failure to feminism, 
a sentiment that many women who 
choose to stay at home claim to share. 
These particular women seemed 
to hold the opinion that because 
women had access to work they 
had a responsibility to permanently 
shed homemaking and stay-at-home 
motherhood all together. So much 
of third and fourth-wave feminist 
theory claims to be embracing the 
liberal mantras of intersectionality, 
diversity and inclusion, and yet they 
exclude the increasing number of 
women who make the choice to stay 
home.
My hope is that by the time I am 
in a position to make that choice, if 
it becomes financially available to 
me, I will have the appreciation and 
respect of not only my spouse and 
parents, but of the women around 
me too. I don’t want to feel as if I have 
failed anybody’s expectations and it 
is sad to think that making the choice 
to stay home and raise kids is seen as 
a failure in our modern world. While 
I am immensely grateful to live in a 
time where I have the opportunity 
to choose to enter the workforce 
full time in nearly any career field I 
would like, it doesn’t mean that I have 
to make this choice simply to buck 
traditional values. In fact, I hope that 
modern America can learn to respect 
families and women who still choose 
traditional values and stay-at-home 
motherhood instead of shaming 
them the way my mother and other 
stay-at-home mothers I know have 
been shamed. While the choice may 
not be for everyone, I know one thing 
for certain: I have nothing but respect 
and admiration for the work my 
mother did in raising my sister and 
me, and she deserves that respect not 
just from me but from other women 
as well.

E

veryone’s a disrupter 
these 
days. 
Whether 
it’s trying to disrupt 
capitalism or trying 
to disrupt how the 
residents 
of 
San 
Francisco consume 
their 
overpriced 
juice, no one seems 
to be happy with 
the way things are. 
However, I believe 
we’ve run into a 
problem 
of 
sorts 
that there is not 
much disrupting left 
to do.
Netflix is a prime example 
of disruptive technology. As 
Netflix has gotten older, it 
has become a worse platform 
because everyone has tried 
to disrupt the industry by 
introducing more and more 
streaming services – Hulu, 
Amazon Prime Video, HBO 
Go 
and 
Disney’s 
recently 
announced 
Disney+. 
And 
though Netflix was the original 
steaming service, since other 
copycat services were created, 
certain broadcast companies 
have 
started 
pulling 
their 
content 
from 
Netflix. 
I 
remember when you could 
watch “Family Guy,” “How I 
Met Your Mother” and others 
on Netflix, but today those 
have all gone elsewhere – and 
there is no sign this will stop. 
Perhaps we are headed toward 
a reality wherein CBS, NBC 
and every other studio will 
stray from signing contracts 
and instead launch their own 
streaming service and if you 
just want a few shows from 
each provider, you have to 
buy all of those subscriptions. 
Of course, once this happens, 
rates of pirating content will 
probably rise. This entire mess 
is ironic because this problem 
is exactly what was supposed 
to be fixed with Netflix. 
Recall that one of the original 

motives behind the whole “cut 
the cord” movement was that 
instead of watching all shows 
offered on cable you 
had to subscribe to 
them all – something 
addressed 
by 
Netflix.
Uber 
is 
another 
example 
of 
disruptive 
technology, but in 
a 
different 
way. 
Uber worked well 
because it addressed 
a 
monopoly. 
The 
reason 
Uber 
was 
able 
to 
grow as fast as it did (despite 
leadership being caught with 
their pants down about once a 
month) was because of the way 
most taxi medallion markets 
were set up. Let’s take New 
York City as an example. In 
a nutshell, the cycle went 
something like this: someone 
would want to be a taxi driver 
and hence needed a medallion. 
Very few new medallions were 
released by the government 
each year due to lobbying 
by the taxi industry, so the 
only way to start was to buy 
a retiring cabbie’s medallion, 
usually for enormous sums. 
That 
cabbie 
would 
then 
retire on that money, so the 
person who wanted to be a 
cabbie would then work until 
retirement and this process 
would happen again. Uber 
came along and removed the 
need for that medallion. They 
democratized the profession of 
taxi driver almost overnight. 
What 
has 
happened 
as 
a 
result? Like most things, there 
have been ups and downs — 
discrimination 
tended 
to 
both decrease and increase 
with 
these 
ride 
sharing 
services, and there have been 
complaints 
about 
Uber’s 
business practices.
Uber worked well because it 
addressed a niche market that 

was in need of being disrupted 
— Netflix did the same when 
it joined the market as a 
streaming service. However, as 
Uber has started doing things 
like Uber Pool Express, a bit 
of a problem has come up. The 
idea behind Express is pretty 
simple: A group of people set 
their destinations and then 
all meet at a predetermined 
spot. Then they are driven to 
another predetermined spot 
and walk the rest of the way 
to their destination. If this 
sounds familiar, then you may 
have heard of a revolutionary 
technology known as a bus, 
which dates to 1905. The issue 
with buses, however, is not 
that they need to be disrupted 
– it is that they need to be 
better funded, among other 
things.
Uber Pool Express’s problem 
is that it’s trying to reinvent 
the wheel and that really gets 
at the banality of so much of 
“disruption” and “innovation”: 
it is done for seemingly no 
reason (save ego stroking). 
However, it makes sense that 
this problem has come up — 
and it is not just with Netflix 
and Uber. I would argue we as 
a society have run out of things 
to change, and we ought to 
stop pretending otherwise and 
creating things for the sake of 
it. This is how we ended up in 
the near parody that we live 
in today featuring everything 
from Netflix for coffee to Uber 
for private jets. Disruption 
just for the sake of disrupting 
(you don’t need a Netflix for 
everything, same with Uber) 
is tiresome. Truth be told, a lot 
of things are fine the way they 
are, and it would do us well to 
reflect on that before trying to 
reinvent the wheel – or bus.

When innovation becomes disruption

Abbie Berringer can be reached at 

abbierbe@umich.edu.

What the Notre Dame fire couldn’t destroy

ANIK JOSHI | COLUMN

Anik Joshi can be reached at anikj@

umich.edu.

Dylan Berger can be reached at 

dylberge@umich.edu.

DYLAN BERGER | COLUMN

SOFIA ZERTUCHE | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT SOFZER@UMICH.EDU

ANIK
JOSHI

