Y ears, decades, centuries from now, students will take a constitutional law class like the one I teach with professor Pamela Brandwein. They may learn, as they do now, about slavery, eugenics, Japanese internment camps and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. They may also learn about how American political history is a story of thoughtful, determined people repeatedly redeeming its promise of liberty, human dignity and equality. And they will read about the history you choose to make in the coming days. You must vote. There are few demands your country makes of you as a citizen, like jury duty and voting. Without those demands, citizenship is meaningless. The development of modern democratic states has transformed the world. Billions have been lifted even in the last 25 years. Violence within and between states has declined. The problems we face, like the pandemic, climate change, economic uncertainty, violations of civil rights, debt, unstable global alliances and eroding democratic norms, are ones we can solve. The primary way we solve problems at a societal level is through voting. Research, by our own professor Arthur Lupia and others, shows the ability of individual voters acting in good faith to make rational choices in the aggregate — one of the miracles of democracy. The moral failure of not voting is graver than selfishness. It’s disrespectful to your fellow citizens if you don’t voice your shared right to think for yourself and contribute to our country — and particularly disrespects those who have this right denied to them. It dishonors the millions of righteous men and women, many of your ancestors and mine, who have been beaten, raped and tortured, who have been given farcical literacy tests and chased after with dogs and fire houses, who suffered through pogroms, book burnings, lynchings and wars; heroes who died in the mud in Belgium and on the beaches of Normandy, who marched hundreds of miles to reservations and re-education programs, who huddled in ships and survived inquisitions, who dared to sit in the wrong place at the lunch counter and on the bus, who were figuratively crucified for loving the wrong person, who were murdered because of the color of their skin or the god they prayed to, who were shot in the sanctity of their own bedroom, who voiced their undying belief in the United States even while their government shipped them away on trains and locked them away in desert camps. The rights many enjoy today — to work in just conditions, to a fair trial, to speak and assemble, to privacy, to our own belongings, to freedom from torture, to freedom from arbitrary arrest, to think and read what we want — are underwritten by the bloodshed of braver forebears. Some are still denied them. These rights are not our assured American destiny. Every morning, many of your fellow citizens wake up willing to die for a belief in these liberties. The least you can do if you are able is to walk down a few flights of stairs or a couple blocks to drop off a ballot, or to wait in line and mark a piece of paper. Do it knowing that many could not, and some still cannot. Because all of those people who came before you and fought believed, as you should, that those pieces of paper change the course of history. Vote. Opinion T he ruling also declared EPGA of 1945 to be unconstitutional. This ruling directly impacts Whitmer’s plan to extend the state of emergency in Michigan from Sept. 29 until Oct. 27. Narrowing the scope from state legislation to the local university community, while this removal of authoritative guidance occurred despite a significant increase in case numbers, the onus is now on the University of Michigan to provide clear public health guidance and support to all individuals, both on and off-campus. Our state has been relying on Whitmer’s extension of the state of emergency to handle the COVID- 19 outbreak and to enforce the guidelines we need to follow to control the spread. It is unclear how the state government will be handling legislation relating to the pandemic moving forward. The effect of repealing EPGA and EMA, alongside the lack of national precedent for the management of a global pandemic, will be the unanswered concern of how to handle potential spread from outlying communities. The severity of the pandemic will likely not decrease after Oct. 27, and with flu season approaching, there is still a greater concern for how the infection will worsen on our campus — especially because the University’s lack of proper testing and overall response has resulted in an increase in case numbers and outbreaks across many different residence halls. This Michigan Supreme Court ruling ultimately emphasizes the importance of taking personal responsibility during the coronavirus pandemic. Thus, The Michigan Daily Editorial Board calls on the University to help outline precautions necessary to compensate for the lack of state legislation that could follow the end of the state of emergency on Oct. 27. We encourage students to continue wearing masks, washing their hands and social distancing on campus. We also call on the University community to sign up to participate in random, voluntary testing through the University, so as to enable our public health experts and contact tracers to develop a comprehensive picture of where COVID-19 infections exist and how to contain them. Additionally, we encourage those on campus to use the University’s ResponsiBLUE app, which allows students to track their symptoms and receive guidance for how and when to reduce their interactions in certain public areas. While students are already required to use this app to enter many buildings on campus, we believe they should use this app even if not mandated to, as it can be useful for identifying cases before they potentially infect more students. There have also been consistent cleaning measures taken in public spaces and residence halls. These actions have helped to not only keep our campus distanced and safe but have worked to give the community faith in our university’s response. We should continue to have confidence in this response after the end of the state of emergency. While we acknowledge the necessity of checks and balances, we are asking the University administration to also shift the conversation and acknowledge the barriers students face when trying to get tested on campus. For example, students have said that the University Health Service rejected their requests to receive testing, despite reporting symptoms or close contact with community members who had tested positive. Some students have also reported that their calls to UHS didn’t go through when they sought testing and that the reported data is inaccurate. Rather than leaving students wondering what options that leaves them with, the University could enlist additional individuals to staff phone lines for UHS. Another potential way for the University to eliminate barriers for students would be by continuing to work with the Washtenaw County Health Department to incorporate testing data from University students at off-campus locations into the University’s COVID-19 dashboard to increase accuracy and timeliness of such data. This lack of authority on a federal and state level has left students without much cohesive direction. We need to demand support from the University to implement safety protocols and procedures that responsibly parallel local measures and take more precautions than the contentious state governments. ERIN WHITE 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. ELIZABETH LAWRENCE Editor in Chief BRITTANY BOWMAN AND EMILY CONSIDINE Editorial Page Editors EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN | COLUMN What disaster experts know Ray Ajemian Zack Blumberg Brittany Bowman Emily Considine Elizabeth Cook Jess D’Agostino Jenny Gurung Cheryn Hong Krystal Hur Min Soo Kim Zoe Phillips Mary Rolfes Gabrijela Skoko Joel Weiner Erin White 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. ELIZABETH LAWRENCE Editor in Chief 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. Wednesday, October 14, 2020 — 8 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com I have found myself asking the following question, set to repeat like a lagging, skipping record: How much time will our leaders spend quantifying the obvious before they act? I’m exhausted from waiting to see it manifest in appropriate action. Our leaders seem preoccupied with data, as if numbers are gods and they are beholden to them. National frustration on all sides is at an inflection point and radiating outward with the abrupt shattering of hallucinatory American life. But the question remains, rephrased here to abandon the hopelessly rhetorical: How will we decide to enact good citizenship at all levels to meet the moment? We’re seeing the dissolution of American childhood ideals of equal opportunity and romance and the stab of expectations unfulfilled; A president who has fallen ill with no one sure whether to believe him. Many of us have been watching for our suspicions to manifest while desperately hoping they won’t. None of the problems that have been exposed are being fixed while we wait and therefore the days feel doomed to repeat themselves. When the University of Michigan’s data on COVID-19 signaled the crossing of another threshold, I felt the baffling commingling of dread and lack of surprise. One way to move forward could be looking to experts who study disasters. Scott Gabriel Knowles, a disaster historian and professor at Drexel University, has been studying and historicizing disasters for decades. I have been tuning in to his podcast COVID-calls, streaming live every day at 5 p.m. EST. In the past, Knowles has suggested we build memorials for the victims of natural disasters and his habit of commemorating what many of us have grown worryingly numb to is a small, measured surprise, as well as a tiny piece of validation amid my daily doom scrolls. On his recent COVID-call with Michael Yudell, a professor at Drexel University who focuses on public health, Yudell noted how W.E.B. DuBois embarked on a project to document public health disparities in Black men 124 years ago. Yudell added, “Here we are, 124 years later, still trying to quantify health disparities that we know exist. Yes, the Band- Aid has been ripped off … but how do we pivot to push society to really take up these issues in a way that leads to change? Because we can measure this stuff to death, which in some ways is what we’ve been doing.” Data represents a complex matrix of stories documenting either a steady accumulation of numbered lives or sudden tragedy. Knowles has made it his life’s work to not only gather data in his academic research but to, as he so aptly puts it,“put knowledge (and data) to work.” Diametrically opposed to this idea is the bureaucracy of today’s mortality counts, which seem to have been borrowed directly from the British empire. I cannot help being reminded here of how so much American legal doctrine is similarly, and sometimes quite bizarrely, descended from archaic British common law. Another guest on Knowles’ COVID-calls, Dartmouth University Professor Jacqueline Wernimont, talked about how the mortality count was commercialized in England during the bubonic plague years. She spoke at length about women called “searchers,” enlisted to perform the dirty work of counting the contaminated corpses filling the streets. Wernimont added that not only weren’t most people officially counted, but church parishioners sold the resulting periodicals for profit along with listings for the price of bread: The mundane mingled inappropriately and deceptively with flattened, two-dimensional tragedy. Wernimont has recently identified a blurry historical line between COVID-19 dashboards today and “mortality bills” in bubonic plague times, adding how their numbers can “blunt the pain of deaths.” During the COVID-call she described how the gruesome labors of these “searching” women, usually poor, recently-widowed London women, were erased. The similarities there — between the invisible labors of medieval “searchers” and today’s workers on the front lines — are striking. To further complicate assumptions about the efficacy of data science, the belief that electronic health records and their standards for “meaningful use” somehow mitigate inconsistencies in the data is wrong. In an article recently published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan Management Review, the authors write that “data standards for the pandemic are not codified in EHRs, and data on the equipment needed to fight it isn’t in them at all.” What this means is our official sources of data are inadequate and inconsistent at best. News companies, university groups and even nonprofit organizations have strained to compensate by attempting to fill knowledge gaps. In the Sloan article, the authors write that this “leads to multiple versions of pandemic truth, adding cost and uncertainty,” and that it also “builds a false sense of confidence … The New York Times reports very specific death counts, camouflaging the uncertainty and severity of the issues, and distracting people from addressing the root issues.” When the national death toll of our modern plague reached 200,001 Americans on Sept. 12, 2020, there were no bells announcing the establishment of the fact. During bubonic plague times in England, every burial event was marked by reverberating acoustics from ringing parish bells. But I knew multitudes of people somewhere were mourning deaths and medical professionals had clearly determined COVID-19 as the cause of each. When I heard the numbered news it felt as if an abstracted national reality was converging with my personal sense of isolation. But the defining shock of the alleged collapse of American democracy reached me later in a delayed reaction — like the long peal of a bell’s toll — when I read an essay on Medium that had gone viral. The essay is by Indi Samarajiva, who survived the Sri Lankan Civil War as a member of its majority and declares America has been in the process of collapsing for some time. He points to how in thirty years of bloody civil war in Sri Lanka around 18,000 people died — fewer than the number of people who died in the United States from COVID-19 in the past three months alone. From The Daily: On our govenor’s powers O n Friday, Oct. 2, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, stating that she does not have the authority to extend executive orders regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and safety protocols she unilaterally put in place. The Michigan Supreme Court based their ruling on the Emergency Management Act of 1976 and the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act of 1945, declaring that Whitmer had the authority to declare a state of emergency once, but did not have the authority to extend nor re-declare a state of disaster past April 30 without legislative approval. Sierra Élise Hansen can be reached at hsierra@umich.edu. Your vote is the history you write — honor the patriots that suffered for it Jacob Walden is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan and can be reached at jawalden@umich.edu. JACOB WALDEN | OP-ED MADELYN VERVAECKE | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT MIVERVAE@UMICH.EDU Read more at MichiganDaily.com Design courtesy of Madison Grosvenor Read more at MichiganDaily.com