Opinion The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4A — Monday, October 7, 2019 Zack Blumberg Emily Considine Emma Chang Joel Danilewitz Emily Huhman Krystal Hur Ethan Kessler Magdalena Mihaylova Max Mittleman Timothy Spurlin Miles Stephenson Finn Storer Nicholas Tomaino Joel Weiner Erin White FINNTAN STORER Managing Editor Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. MAYA GOLDMAN Editor in Chief MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA AND JOEL DANILEWITZ 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 T he nearly three years of Donald Trump’s presidency have been an absolute whirlwind. From sexual assault accusations to the Sharpie scandal, there hasn’t been a second for us to catch our breath. Every time a scandal happens, people call for Trump’s impeachment. Yet, he seems to get past each scandal relatively unharmed. That was until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had previously been hesitant to bring impeachment to the table, decided enough was enough and announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump (though he is still relatively unharmed). This came after a whistleblower complaint that Trump had allegedly pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. He also allegedly threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine should Zelensky not comply. While the impeachment inquiry should be exciting news to many Democrats, they should also be concerned. There are two main reasons Democrats are excited about the news of a possible impeachment, with the first being their pure disdain for Trump. More than 200 House Democrats have a burning desire to see Trump kicked out of office. Presidential candidate former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, hammered Trump as being “sick” and “unfit for this office.” The only problem is that calling someone unfit isn’t a good enough reason for impeachment. Each party will claim that a president of the opposing party is unfit — that is party politics. However, pressuring a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a presidential candidate and his son may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it ultimately made Pelosi fold on pushing off impeachment. The other reason many Democrats want to see Trump impeached is because doing so would set a precedent. If Democrats do not pursue impeachment, then Trump’s illegal actions will become commonplace. One of the most dangerous things in politics is precedent. If Trump can do something illegal, what stops the next president from taking the same course of action? While many Democrats may be gung-ho about impeachment, they should be extremely wary of pushing ahead. I believe it is incredibly important for the Democrats to not allow a precedent to be set, but there is a much more present danger of impeachment. Should the Democrats in the House succeed in bringing up charges of impeachment, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his colleagues in the Senate would not convict Trump and remove him from office. It would be totally off- color for McConnell. He blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court appointee and has blocked numerous bills that have recently passed in the U.S. House, including election security bills and gun control legislation. In order for the Senate to convict Trump and remove him from office there would need to be a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In this political era, it’s rare to get senators on the same page for simple things, so it would be virtually impossible to get enough of them to agree on something as polarizing as convicting Trump. What would a failed impeachment mean for Democrats? Well, for starters, the public appearance of the Democratic party would be tarnished. An impeachment without conviction would validate Trump’s claim that the continual calls for impeachment were a giant witch hunt. The bigger problem for Democrats would be the energy boost that Trump’s base would receive: His rallies would be bigger, and his donations would skyrocket. It is not hard for one to imagine the rhetoric Trump would come up with after not being convicted. There would be endless name calling and hateful Twitter rants in all caps. Giving Trump momentum into an election year would be a very costly mistake for the Democrats. It could end in disaster for the party with Trump getting elected again in 2020. All it takes is to go on Twitter to already see how his base is reacting. Many of them are claiming that it’s all a lie and the Democrats are trying to steal the election, including the presidency. Democrats have consistently said the main goal of 2020 is defeating Trump. While many see impeachment as one of the possible avenues to do that, I do not view it as the ideal pathway to Democratic success. If the Democrats really want to turn the country around, they should beat Trump outright in the 2020 general election and avoid the chaos of a failed Trump impeachment, and the inevitable division that will arise with it. Impeachment isn’t all fun and games KIANNA MARQUEZ | COLUMN The importance of color in our world JONATHAN VAYSMAN | COLUMN D uring a meeting for a student organization I’m involved in, we had an icebreaker activity that asked, “Would you rather be color- blind or lose your taste buds?” After pondering the idea for a couple of seconds, I walked to the side of the room representing the latter, where the minority of people stood. I justified losing my taste buds because theoretically losing my ability to see color was unimaginable. For me, there’s a powerful emotional significance to the various colors that I see every day. Colors reflect mood, purpose and the uniqueness of living and nonliving beings. I believe it’s ultimately our responsibility to recognize that diminishing color from our lives, such as in the natural spaces around us and in the people among us, means diminishing our ability to mold a society whose functional potential can be powerfully multidimensional and far-reaching. The presence of color in our surrounding environments serves as an untold essential contributor to our mental health. A 2006 study confirms that spending time in nature can counteract the toxic stress that occurs in our daily lives because viewing stimulating natural scenes can create a pleasurable experience for the brain. Another study discovered that plant life can have similar biological influences on the body as aromatherapy, a phenomenon essentially built on the collective leverage of the visual, olfactory and touching senses with each other. When placed in a workspace with a multicolored personality in its greenery and abundant sunlight, employees demonstrated a 15-percent increase in reported well-being. Unknowingly, we are uplifted by the dynamic structure and presentation of nature in ways that are generally unobservable on a minuscule level, yet we would likely feel a dramatic change if these characteristics of nature ceased to exist. While ensuring the presence of green space can be the first step towards using nature to improve our livelihood, it’s worth noting that the green space must be well kept in order to have these positive influences on our behavior. In other words, the pleasurable and therapeutic effects that viewing nature can have are best conveyed when the nature looks natural and unaffected by man- made destruction. A Time Magazine article about the psychological effect of green spaces mentions Dr. Andrew Lee’s commentary on their functionality as social spaces: “If a green space is difficult to get to, has poor lighting or is not clean, it may be seen as unsafe or inaccessible and probably wouldn’t boost a visitor’s mood.” With that being said, it’s important to let the behaviors of diverse and flourishing plant life carry on naturally and that we minimize drastic alterations to allow them to fulfill their abstract healing potentials. Not only can dynamic natural spaces be attributed to the health of the people who experience it every day, but these spaces can also be indicative of the health of the environment these people live in. When the color of an area is changed from natural, earthy tones to a modern white, eccentric slate or abysmal black alongside human intervention in the area, this more often than not suggests the poor quality of the environment in this area. For instance, a Rice University review of marine life in the Caribbean comments on the importance of the multicolored coral reefs for the quality of their surrounding marine ecosystem. The varying vibrant colors of the coral reefs are able to reflect sunlight differently to protect them from damage. In addition, their colors attract various species of fish for mating and shield them from predators, which ultimately contributes to the livelihood of all surrounding sea life. As a result, these coral reefs are contributing to the quality of their surrounding marine environment by allowing the many organisms within this environment to carry forth their every day behaviors that contribute to their survival and future evolution. In the many areas around the world that are suffering from coral bleaching, the loss of color in these natural spaces suggests a loss of ability for these spaces to provide for the evolution of the organisms in them, and thus the distress that is placed on the quality of these environments. It’s also important to realize that almost nothing functions as well as it could when the parts of the system don’t think or act diversely and don’t represent different functions that ultimately allow the multidimensional system to perform. It’s not surprising that some connoisseurs of capitalism and exploitation neglect the importance of diversity in nature, just as they neglect the importance of diversity in people. However, it’s imperative to acknowledge and act upon the idea that diversity in function and in representation is essential to the progression of mankind. While we waste time debating if these marginalized groups — naturally and socially- constructed — of our world are important enough to care about, we are ignoring a slow obliteration that is curtailing the outcome of their future permanently. The expansion of diversified characteristics is inevitably beneficial for our health, the health of our environment and the health of our society. We shouldn’t choose to ignore our ability to acknowledge color in its many visual and metaphysical forms if we have the choice. Kianna Marquez can be reached at kmarquez@umich.edu. Jonathan Vaysman can be reached at jvaysman@umich.edu. 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 EDITBOARD Join The Michigan Daily! Come to Editboard meetings Monday and Wednesday from 7:15 to 8:45 at the Newsroom, 420 Maynard St. Engage in discourse about important issues and become a journalist! JOEL WEINER | COLUMN Prison reform in America is far overdue I n October 2013, The Vera Institute of Justice organized a tour of prisons in Germany and the Netherlands with the intent to educate American delegates about the systems of incarceration in other countries. The condition of prisons in these countries was surprising to Americans because they were so different from our own. The guards treated the prisoners with dignity and respect by talking with them out of a genuine interest in what they had to say. The policies of those prisons also generated a culture of independence and self-reliance: Prisoners were allowed to make their own meals and wear their own clothes. In addition, to give prisoners a sense of purpose and to prepare them for life outside the prison, every incarcerated person was required to have a job. Those are practices prisons in the United States should seek to emulate. The treatment of inmates in our detention centers is abhorrent. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union called three prisoners to testify in a federal case against the state of Mississippi. The inmates, who were held at East Mississippi Correctional Facility, described horrifying sanitary conditions and decrepit facilities, such as plumbing problems so severe that fecal matter would come out of showerheads in bathrooms and drains in cells, and the kitchen would be infested with roaches. Prisons in the U.S. are also severely understaffed. Every position from guards to mental health specialists are in short supply. In St. Clair Correctional Facility, an infamously violent prison in Alabama, a mentally ill inmate said his monthly check-ups were usually only about five to 10 minutes long. Guards are few and far in between, allowing ample time for violence and injustice to proliferate. Sometimes, to get guards’ attention, inmates will create emergency situations like lighting fires or cutting their wrists. The lengths to which prisoners will go to access a corrections officer demonstrate that America does not have enough guards keeping prisons functional. Since prison staff are the sole authority over prisoners’ wellbeing, they ought to be reasonably accessible, but because there are so few of them — the South Mississippi Correctional Institution has an inmate-to-guard ratio of 23 to one — and because they only respond to the most desperate calls for help, inmates are largely left to deal with problems themselves. There are a few reasons why there are so few guards. The first is that most people simply do not want to work in prisons because guards are paid low wages for brutal work, like breaking up fights. The average salary is $44,000 per year, and correctional officers are the second most likely profession to be non-fatally assaulted on the job. In addition, many prisons house inmates far above their capacity — in 2013, more than 17 states were holding inmates above capacity. In Illinois, for instance, prisons were at 151 percent capacity. Another reason for the harsh conditions in prisons stems from their design. The belief that all criminals must be isolated from society has lead to prisons being some of the most secluded parts of civilization, from their geography to their architecture. Prisons are often built in remote locations, where few people ever travel. This is mainly for public safety, but it also leads to a startling lack of oversight. The most interaction many Americans have with prisons is passing them on the highway, so few people ever see what lies beyond the barbed wire fences. Even when government agencies inspect prisons, they sometimes warn prisons in advance of their arrival, giving the staff time to prepare. This startling lack of oversight has to be addressed. By instituting policies that would open the system up to more scrutiny, we can ensure that prison guards do not mistreat inmates. This obviously does not mean dangerous, violent offenders should be in close contact with the general public. But any effective reform would, however, entail fundamentally changing the structure of detention centers to offer inmates more agency and autonomy, thus helping the incarcerated acclimate to conditions similar to those they will be released into. That will make the transition to life outside of prison easier, helping them stay out of trouble. At the center of prison reform is ending mass incarceration. The morality of unnecessarily incarcerating people aside, having fewer people in prisons would make the job of prison guards easier because they would have fewer inmates to watch, and it would prevent more violence from breaking out. These changes would not just improve the living conditions of prisoners, they would make the entire corrections system far more effective because emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment would bring down our recidivism rate, which is when released prisoners reoffend. Studies demonstrate that vocational programs and educational opportunities in prisons decrease the likelihood of rearrest after release by over 50 percent. Since the criminal justice system should help inmates become productive members of society, the recidivism rate ought to be one of the most telling statistics of its success. As such, rehabilitation programs should be at the forefront of prison reform. The issues in U.S. prisons are not just a problem for prisoners, they are a reflection of our country’s morals. We as a society are collectively responsible for their treatment, meaning the despicable state of corrections facilities is a failure on our part. As a nation that cherishes liberty, we ought to treat the removal of our esteemed freedoms with the utmost seriousness. We should be deeply disturbed at the current conditions of those we incarcerate and take actions for change. By decreasing the incarceration rate, increasing the number of guards in prisons and investing in education and vocational programs, our corrections centers can become better for inmates, prison staff and the country. Joel Weiner can be reached at jgweiner@umich.edu. Color in our surrounding environments serves as an untold essential conributor to our mental health While the impeachment inquiry should be exciting news to many Democrats, they should also be concerned JOEL WEINER At the center of prison reform is ending mass incarceration KIANNA MARQUEZ