7-Opinion

T

his past week, there was a little 
drama in the race for New Mexico’s 
1st Congressional District. Sheridan 

Lund, the precinct chair of the Democratic 
Party of Bernalillo County and candidate for 
the congressional seat, tweeted a now-deleted 
attack on one of the candidates. The charge 
being leveled was that Victor Reyes, a former 
top aide to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan 
Grisham and one of the candidates for the 
congressional seat, was only pretending to be 
a person of color. Reyes is a second-generation 
Mexican-American. Many of the other 
candidates running for Congress in this district 
released statements condemning the attack. 
What interested me is that at the time that the 
offending tweet was deleted, it only had about 
two likes and two negative quote tweets. 

My recent tweet about Fortnite skins got 

more likes than these poorly thought-out 
musings on colorism. By responding to Lund’s 
message, every candidate in the race was able 
to accrue some political capital and establish 
themselves as the candidate of racial justice. But 
they shouldn’t have responded. 

This falls in with a trend with which I’ve 

taken issue recently: treating certain social 
media posts as much more influential than 
they actually are. Media literacy is important 
and constantly evolving. Today I am offering an 
additional digital rule of thumb: Don’t engage 
with posts that don’t have traction (likes, 
shares, etc.). If a post doesn’t have engagement, 
that is the internet’s way of telling you that no 
one really found the post to be compelling, so 
you won’t actually be swaying any opinions by 
condemning it. Actors on the digital landscape, 
no matter how large or small the audience, 
have a responsibility to only respond to a piece 
of media they disagree with if it has an actual 
audience. Otherwise, they aren’t countering the 
sway of the original idea. 

On the contrary, they are amplifying it 

to their audience who wouldn’t have been 
exposed to it in the first place. Those who 
devote themselves to criticizing irrelevant posts 
that gained no traction on the 
merits of the 

idea presented are distorting the narrative — 
and doing a disservice to themselves and their 
audience in the process. 

Highlighting the fringe is how many figures 

of the online political influencer class make 
their livings. Ben Shapiro, probably the most 
influential conservative online pundit, recently 
released a YouTube video entitled “Leftists 
OUTRAGED Over Bill Burr Jokes at 2021 
Grammys.” The premise of the video is that 

there are currently swathes of rabid Democrats 
who want to take your comedy away from you, 
a premise engineered to infuriate his audience. 
This simply wasn’t true. 

If you looked on Twitter, where the outrage 

was allegedly coming from, a couple of negative 
posts had gained a few hundred likes. But it 
seemed for every negative tweet about Bill 
Burr with five or ten likes, there were scores 
of people absolutely indignant that people 
could be so sensitive, all producing the same 
ten offending Tweets as evidence for a larger 
cultural sickness. 

So what should people respond to on the 

internet? I would offer a couple of criteria for 
a post to be considered worthy of a response. 
First, how much traction did this idea actually 
get? If Joe Schmoe posts on Facebook that we 
should put the Social Security Trust Fund into 
Bitcoin, and the post receives two likes and 
one “Interesting!” comment from his second-
grade teacher, I am confident that the national 
narrative would not benefit from a prominent 
account screenshotting it, posting to their 
thousands of followers, and doing the 21st 
century equivalent of eviscerating the person 
on a daytime talk show. 

However, if Joe Schmoe’s post somehow 

manages to gain traction, then it might be 
worth engaging. On the other hand, if Ezra 
Klein, a New York Times columnist, tweets that 
we should put the Social Security Trust Fund 
into Bitcoin, regardless of how much or how 
little engagement the post gets, this thought 
is relevant and merits a response. Overall, you 
should respond if the thinker is prominent or if 
the reach of their thought was large.

These criteria apply less and less the 

closer the person is to you. I still want 
to empower you to get into Facebook 
arguments with your cousins about what 
time of year is best for seeing geese, because 
that person actually has a huge audience 
relative to your life — you and everyone 
close to you are the intended audiences. In 
a lot of ways, the internet is not necessarily 
a public forum. It is the Diag. You aren’t 
there to speak about and listen to a specific 
topic, you are there to do your own thing. 
If someone is shouting at the top of their 
lungs from one of those benches in front 
of Hatcher Graduate Library, you and 
everyone else would probably walk right by 
them. But if you see a crowd of a thousand 
listening to some weirdo’s ideas about the 
Federal Reserve, you have much more of a 
desire to comment. 

On the internet, we perceive things to be 

much more oriented at us than we do in real 
life. The phenomenon I am talking about is 
based much more on remoteness. If Facebook 
arguments with relatives are hand-to-hand 
combat, I am preaching against snipers: 
rummaging through the internet for the sole 
purpose of becoming enraged, finding the 
worst articulation of the offending concept, and 
pulling the trigger.

Let’s circle back to the tweet that caused all 

my strife in the NM-1 congressional race. What 
should the candidates have done? I don’t want to 
sound too much like a kindergarten teacher, but 
ignoring it is often the best policy. Platforming 
the fringe is a poor decision. If an idea isn’t 
held by a significant number of people, it isn’t 
important enough to bring to the attention of 
your audience, or even worth your time. 

I know it’s almost all I write about these 

days, but this phenomenon contributes 
to political polarization. Picking the least 
articulate, least important post which was 
unable to gain any traction on the merits of its 
ideas, and magnifying it — responding to it as 
if it’s something greater — causes audiences to 
perceive society as a split between themselves 
and those who formulated the odd ideas in 
question. And that is rarely an accurate map 
of the populace. There is a genre of accounts 
that will find a post with not much traction, 
expressing the least developed version of an 
idea, and compile it with thousands of others 
with the goal of proving how much better X or 
Y ideology is than the other. 

Ignoring fringe posts won’t solve much. 

It won’t dismantle polarization, bigotry or 
online rudeness, but it will avoid unnecessarily 
elevating an idea no one listened to in the first 
place. It’s also a way to practice some self-
respect. Often the only way we can interpret 
social media is as a direct message to us, and 
one which needs a response. Thinking of the 
internet as the Diag instead of a conversation 
or a forum can help you escape this mindset. 
People aren’t talking to you, they’re preaching 
into the air. It isn’t your responsibility to 
counter every silly thing someone says from 
their digital soapbox, but if other people start 
engaging with the idea, then you have the right 
to add your own commentary about the original 
post. With these criteria for social media non-
confrontation, you can become a beacon of 
restraint in the digital age.

Opinion
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 — 13
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

ALEX NOBEL | COLUMNIST

O

n a basic level, humans need 
four things to survive: food, 
water, shelter and air. Three of 

these have already been commodified, 
leaving only air untouched. Human 
beings take an average of 22,000 breaths 
per day. Whether someone is exercising, 
sick or breathing polluted air, breathing 
is something that isn’t noticed until it’s 
difficult to do. Between the COVID-19 
pandemic, the West Coast wildfires and 
an increase in global pollution, clean air is 
becoming more and more of a luxury. Air 
cannot become commercialized like food, 
shelter and water already have; this would 
put the lives of millions of people in danger. 

COVID-19 has taught us many things 

about the way our society functions, but 
one major takeaway is that even basic tasks 
like breathing can become disrupted by 
unexpected phenomena. As elementary, 
middle and high schools move to reopen, 
they have faced the question of how to 
fit hundreds of students into hot, poorly 
ventilated classrooms. 

At first glance, schools should be hotbeds 

for viral spread. Infections are 18.7 times 
more likely to occur indoors, where virus 
particles remain in the air for up to three 
hours. However, schools have invested 
heavily in high-efficiency particulate air 
filters that work to prevent molecules from 
being transported by air. While these are 
not perfect, they have done a solid job in 
classrooms that have invested properly in 
the air filtration systems. 

But what happens when a school district 

cannot afford the ventilation systems that 
satisfy Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention guidelines? A federal watchdog 
service found that 41% of grade schools 
needed to update or completely overhaul 
their air filtration systems prior to COVID-
19. These schools often faced tight budgets 
and had to opt for the cheapest filtration 
systems. New York City’s public schools 
have bought over 30,000 new air filtration 
systems since the pandemic started, but 
teachers, concerned they will not be enough 
to ensure students’ safety, crowdfunded 
an additional $159,000 to purchase more. 
Schools in poorer neighborhoods need to 
upgrade their current systems just to reach 
the pre-pandemic filtration level of those in 
schools in rich neighborhoods. 

Unfortunately, this problem extends 

beyond 
classrooms. 
Due 
to 
cheap 

construction materials and techniques, 
the air in our homes can be up to five 
times dirtier than outdoors. As people are 
spending more time indoors because of the 
pandemic, they are spending more time 
breathing dirty — albeit, COVID-19 free 
— air. Dozens of health issues have been 
linked to unclean indoor air, such as asthma, 
allergies, depression and sleep apnea. 

Yet, outdoor air can be just as dangerous. 

Data from the World Health Organization 
shows that nine in every 10 people globally 
breathe air that exceeds WHO standards 
for pollutant levels. That same data found 
that seven million people die every year 
from air pollution, and air pollution is 
responsible for roughly one out of every 
eight deaths worldwide. The United 
Nations estimates that air pollution costs all 
nations combined around $5 trillion every 
year in prevention and mitigation efforts. 
In the United States, the Clean Air Act 
has helped lower lead air pollution by 92% 
since 1980, but globally, half of all people are 
experiencing worsening air quality. 

Last fall, California, Oregon and 

Washington experienced unprecedented 
wildfires. The fires were not only 
unprecedented in their severity, but also in 
their effect on the nation’s air quality. As a 
result of the fires, one in seven Americans 
experienced dangerous levels of pollutants 
in their air. The fires impacted air quality 
in nearby areas such as Portland, Ore., 
which had the world’s worst air quality, 
but their impact was also felt across the 
world, including in Europe. As climate 
change increases the frequency of forest 
fires, they will only continue to harm 
global air quality. 

Urban centers generally have the 

worst air quality, and as more people 
continue to move to cities around the 
world, they give us a good place to start 
improving air quality. One basic step 
that cities can take is creating more 
green spaces. Whether by planting trees, 
creating roof gardens or expanding 
public parks, creating these green spaces 
reduces air pollution and provides 
residents with cleaner, cooler air, along 
with many other health benefits. 

Another major step that can be taken 

is transitioning toward electric buses and 
trains and encouraging biking and walking 
through safer trails and sidewalks. Motor 
vehicles in Philadelphia contribute to 
about 60% of the city’s total air pollution, 
demonstrating how switching to green 
transportation could significantly lower 
emissions.

Like all aspects of climate change, air 

quality issues harm vulnerable populations 
the 
most 
and 
compound 
existing 

inequities. Solutions must take this into 
account or risk worsening inequalities. 
Air quality isn’t about preserving the 
planet or environment for generations to 
come. Rather, it is about improving public 
health right now and averting preventable 
diseases, health problems and premature 
deaths. 

The price of clean air

LYDIA STORELLA | COLUMNIST

Michigan’s sex-ed hurts students’ sexual health

Lydia Storella is an Opinion Columnist and 

can be reached at storella@umich.edu. 

V

accines. The epitome of short-
term pain, long-term gain. A 
scientific achievement and feat 

of human accomplishment that can be 
received in a grocery store pharmacy. 
A quick pinch in the arm gives people 
more hope than they’ve felt in a year. The 
vaccine is nothing short of a miracle and 
likely what will usher us out of the current 
pandemic. While it seems like campus 
is abuzz about the vaccine, especially 
with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s, D-Mich., 
statement about vaccine availability for 
all adults aged 16 and older on April 5, 
I am deeply concerned by a pattern of 
behavior that has emerged: lying about 
one’s situation expressly for the purpose 
of getting a vaccine.

Like all education in the United States, 

individual states set their own standards 
for sex education. Many states need to 
reform these standards. Only 39 states and 
Washington, D.C., require sex ed and/or 
HIV education, and it only gets worse from 
there. 

A mere 17 states require that the 

information provided be medically accurate 
— five of which don’t even require sex 
education 
in 
classrooms. 
Additionally, 

five states require only providing negative 
information about homosexuality, and 19 
states require that sex ed must teach that it is 
important to wait until marriage to have sex. 

The last time the state of Michigan 

updated its sex-ed standards was 2004, 
nearly 20 years ago. It includes relics of 
the past, such as forbidding teaching that 
abortion is reproductive health and requiring 
“stressing abstinence from sex.” While 
Michigan requires HIV/AIDS education, it, 
along with 19 other states, does not require 
sex education. Family planning drugs or 
devices (e.g. condoms) cannot be handed out 
to students. 

In fact, much of the content about 

contraceptives (labeled “risk reduction” 
in the summary) is left to the discretion of 
the school districts, which means that many 
Michigan students do not receive education 
about birth control options, leaving them 
vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases 
and teen pregnancy. 

Sex education has positive effects on 

the health of students. The Centers for 
Disease Control and Prevention assesses 
that the benefits of providing quality sex 
ed to students include delaying sex, having 
fewer experiences with unprotected sex and 
avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and 
unintended pregnancy. The CDC provides 
sex ed standards for fifth, eighth and 10th 
graders, which culminates in the 10th 
grade with discussions about contraceptive 
options (which includes condoms as well 
as abstinence), consensual sex and sexual 
health. 

Leaving so much important information 

to the judgment of individual school 
districts means that the quality of sex ed 
varies widely across the state of Michigan. 
The required emphasis on the importance 
of abstinence and forbidding discussions 
of abortion as reproductive health in all 
Michigan public schools only works to limit 
the knowledge of Michigan students about 
birth control, which impacts their sexual 
health and safety going forward.

The 
sex 
education 
standards 
also 

make no mention of content regarding 
LGBTQ+ issues or sexual orientation in 
general. Considering that the percentage 
of Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ is 
growing, especially among the younger 
generations, it is imperative that such 
information 
be 
taught 
in 
Michigan’s 

public schools, which have over 1.5 million 
students.

While 
Republicans 
tend 
to 
prefer 

including abstinence and Democrats were 
more likely to prefer including discussions 
about birth control, consent and sexual 
orientation, 
both 
Republicans 
and 

Democrats want some form of sex ed to be 
taught in the classrooms. But it’s difficult 
to get state lawmakers to be proactive in 
fighting for sex education due to the topic’s 
controversial nature. Even in progressive 
states, it can be difficult to implement sex ed 
reform; in California, comprehensive sex ed 
wasn’t required until 2016. 

In states with a Republican-controlled 

branch of government, like Michigan, 
implementing sex education reform can 
be even more difficult. Fifty-nine percent 
of Republicans think that premarital sex is 
morally unacceptable, compared to 27% of 
Democrats, leading many to oppose material 
that could be seen as encouraging students 
to have sex.

Not only does comprehensive sex education 

help to reduce rates of teen pregnancy and 
sexually transmitted diseases, but preaching 

abstinence doesn’t even help to reduce the 
rates of teenagers having sex. Studies have 
shown that abstinence-only education does 
not delay sex, but instead leaves students 
unsafe and at risk for pregnancy and sexually 
transmitted diseases. 

But few topics are as important 

to the Republican Party as abortion, 
which is the second-most important 
issue for Republicans when deciding 
which presidential candidate to vote for. 
States that emphasize abstinence in sex 
education have the highest rates of teen 
pregnancy and teen birth. Thirty-one 
percent of teenagers who get pregnant 
have an abortion; access to birth control 
dramatically 
reduces 
pregnancy 
and 

abortion among teenagers. While free 
and accessible birth control is a separate 
issue from sex education, it is possible that 
teen abortion rates would decrease if all 
states included a judgment-free discussion 
of contraceptives in their sex education 
and diminished the importance placed 
on abstinence. This could help to reduce 
abortion rates, something that Republicans 
certainly support. 

Michigan sex education needs to be 

updated. Stressing abstinence and making 
discussion of contraceptives discretionary 
only makes Michigan students unprepared 
for sex whenever they choose to have it. 
Considering that sex is a natural and vital 
human function, it is ignorant to assume 
that abstinence is a helpful way of teaching 
teenagers about sex, especially since it 
has been proven that comprehensive sex 
education reduces rates of unintended 
pregnancy 
and 
sexually 
transmitted 

diseases. Michigan, along with the rest of 
the country, must update its sex education 
standards in order to educate its students on 
safe sexual health and experiences.

Alex Nobel is an Opinion Columnist and 

can be reached at anobel@umich.edu. 

Design by Sharon Kwan

SHUBHUM GIROTI | COLUMNIST
Enough is enough — we must 

defend the Uighurs

O

n Monday, March 22, the United 
States, the United Kingdom and 
Canada coordinated with the 

European Union in sanctioning China over 
their treatment of Uighur Muslims in their 
country. This move begs the question: why 
did this policy take so long to be enacted? 

The Uighurs are a minority Turkic-

Muslim population located mainly in 
northwestern China who have recently 
become the target of Chinese monitoring 
and detention. Starting in 2016, the 
Chinese government was found to have 
been creating “re-education camps,” or 
facilities in which they captured and 
imprisoned the Uighurs. China spent 
a long time denying that their camps 
were actually being used for malice. 
Instead, China asserts that the prisoners 
were simply being re-educated because 
some 
had 
become 
“extremists,” 

although no such evidence exists. In 
2018, the Chinese government finally 
acknowledged that these places existed 
and were not for re-education. They 
said they were imprisoning individuals 
for low-level crimes and vocational 
training. However, anecdotal accounts 
completely reject this notion. 

In 2019, U.N. representatives sent a 

letter to the U.N. High Commissioner 
explaining their concern with the large 
number of Uighurs being imprisoned, 
and the fact that the Chinese government 
was violating human rights laws. During 
former 
President 
Donald 
Trump’s 

administration in September 2019, the U.S. 
finally spoke up and condemned China’s 
actions on an international scale. Critically, 
former President Trump himself said 
in the summer of 2020 that he had been 
holding off on sanctioning China over their 
treatment of the Uighurs for the past year 
to preserve trade talks. This leads us to the 
question of where we should morally draw 
a line between our economic prosperity 
and human rights abuses happening in 
other countries. 

It is no secret that economics and global 

politics play a massive role in domestic 
politics, but this issue highlights how far 
will some countries, specifically the U.S., 
will go to protect trade talks and economic 
negotiations when human rights abuses 

are transpiring every day. The protection 
of human life and preservation of human 
rights must be the utmost priority. 

One 
major 
goal 
of 
the 
Biden 

administration must be to build back the 
U.S.’s image on the international stage after 
world leaders both literally and figuratively 
laughed at Trump and the country. From 
Trump criticizing NATO to taking the U.S. 
out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, our 
international reputation has taken a hit. 

While President Joe Biden did return 

the U.S. to the United Nations Human 
Rights Council, this is not enough. 
Taking a firm stance on human rights 
would set the ball in motion for the 
U.S. to come back as a key player in the 
international community. Joining in 
on these sanctions is a step in the right 
direction, but it would be even better if 
the U.S. decided to stop doing business 
with companies associated with Uighur 
labor, such as Nike, Amazon, Gap, Adidas 
and many more. 

Biden should call on the U.S. Senate to 

fast-track and pass H.R.6210, the Uighur 
Forced Labor Prevention Act. This act, 
which passed the House of Representatives 
on a bipartisan 406-3 vote, ended up stalling 
in the Senate committees. If Biden is truly 
committed to ensuring Uighurs in China 
are treated fairly and better protected, he 
must use the bully pulpit of the presidency 
and place a magnifying glass on this issue 
for the world. 

The time to favor economic benefits 

over the internment of hundreds of 
thousands of individuals and human rights 
abuses is over. We as a society need to 
recognize that our economy and individual 
monetary success pales in comparison 
to the livelihood of individuals we may 
not personally know. It is imperative that 
as we continue to pressure the Biden 
administration about the human rights of 
people of color in this country, we do not 
forget that his influence goes far beyond 
just these 50 states. If Biden takes a firm 
stance on defending the Uighurs, we can 
finally say our president is working for 
everyone. 

Shubhum Giroti is an Opinion Columnist 

and can be reached at sgiroti@umich.edu. 

JULIAN BARNARD | COLUMNIST
No comment: the value of restraint in the digital age

Julian Barnard is an Opinion Columnist and 

can be reached at jcbarn@umich.edu. 

