F
or those currently unaware, in the state of
Michigan, everyone — and yes that means
everyone — above the age of 16 is eligible to receive
a COVID-19 vaccine as of April 5. This is the case country-
wide, for the most part, with the exception of a few states
that are expanding their eligibility soon.
In other words, the time to get vaccinated is upon us.
The University of Michigan has already vaccinated over
40,000 individuals and that number is likely to increase
soon, particularly among our now eligible student
population. As I wrote not long ago, it is imperative that
students get vaccinated as soon as possible; doing so is not
only vital for the betterment of the community’s public
health, but also for increasing the possibilities
for various gatherings and related activities
during the upcoming fall semester.
On a national scale, around 35% of the
United States’s population has received at
least the first dose of a vaccine. If we remain at
the current pace of vaccination, we can expect
that number to reach at least 75% by the end of
June, if not higher. Slowly but surely, normal is in
sight — so again, go get vaccinated.
Now that my biweekly plea to my peers to get
vaccinated has been made, it’s important to also
think about what happens after the U.S. has reached
the target vaccination level. After all, for many,
including myself, normalcy includes the freedom to travel
internationally. On either end — traveling outside of the
U.S. or returning home — proof of vaccination is likely
going to be a requirement for entry at some point.
Vaccination passports, which are essentially digitized
proofs of vaccination, are beginning to be tested by a
handful of companies and institutions here in the U.S.
While the topic remains relatively controversial amongst
some politicians, a vaccination mandate of some sort could
possibly be a smart idea (and a legal one, for those worried)
for maintaining safety within some contexts.
But the argument against these “passports” is more
nuanced than the blanket statement of “I don’t like the
restrictions a mandate like this imposes on my freedoms,”
although that certainly is a stance for those also against
vaccination in the first place. To those individuals, I
urge you to read the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention’s article detailing the benefits of vaccination.
Now, back to my main point. To illustrate it best,
let’s consider a hypothetical. You are looking to attend a
Detroit Pistons game with some friends next winter and
the NBA, or even simply the Pistons themselves, have
an application or system that requires you to sign in and
verify your vaccination status. While for some it won’t be
an issue, there are many who will be concerned about
the fact that the Detroit Pistons organization now has
access to part of their health-related information — your
vaccination records and maybe more. That is just one
possible scenario.
Imagine how many leisure or non-essential activities
one does within a week, such as dining at a restaurant
or going to the gym. Depending on how something
like a vaccination passport is implemented, all of these
organizations could theoretically have data about parts
of your vaccination history.
While that concern could likely be mitigated if a
standardized means of checking vaccination status can
be established, we are far from that point. The companies
and institutions experimenting with such a system are
not using the same means of checking vaccination status;
each is using their own technologies and that variation
in technology is where the heart of the privacy concern
comes into play. If every company across the U.S. were
to use the same methods for checking, privacy concerns
could likely be quelled.
There is also the concern of the false sense of security
that implementing a standardized vaccination passport
might bring. There will be many that will likely interpret
such proof of vaccination as equivalent to not having the
disease, or being safe from getting it. Indeed, the approved
COVID-19 vaccines have shown to be effective in trials
thus far, but one should not equate vaccination with
guaranteed immunity.
And, of course, there are various equity-related
concerns.
Both
domestically
and
especially
internationally, many have not or are not going to be able
to receive a vaccine for some time. In that regard, there
has to be a push and pull between mandating vaccination
and making sure the white and wealthy do not have an
unfair “immuno-privilege” because of how access to
vaccines has unfolded on a global scale.
At the same time, vaccination passports
have the ability to establish an efficient and
possibly more reliable means of keeping the
virus from entering certain establishments,
or even the country as a whole. In other
words, the passport idea is not all bad. Proof
of vaccination, at the end of the day, is the
most likely way of providing assurance that
one does not have COVID-19. The implications
for hospitals, care facilities, etc., who have been
restricting loved ones from connecting while
sick with other conditions are considerable.
With all of that being said, in no way should
these criticisms of passports persuade anyone from
getting vaccinated. They are the most effective way to
protect oneself from the virus and to ensure a return to
some degree of normalcy soon, at least domestically. Still,
as more of us get vaccinated, there will need to be some
thorough policy considerations from our governments
and the private sector. Prioritizing privacy, equity and
public health all at the same time is not an easy thing to
do — but it needs to be done.
Until we reach that point, the message remains the
same: Go get vaccinated. For U-M students, there are only
about two weeks left in the semester; make it happen so
the fall can be enjoyed alongside others.
I
’ve talked a great deal about the ongoing sanctions
campaign by the United States against Iran — arguably
more than anyone should. Nevertheless, I believe there is
a good reason for talking about the sanctions so much: They are
one of the longest sustained campaigns of immiseration against
any country, outside of wartime, in the last century.
As I stated in my column in January, they have wreaked
havoc on Iran’s economy and severely hampered its ability to
fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, in April, as the academic
semester draws to a close, I’d like to turn away from the
humanitarian devastation these sanctions have wrought and
instead turn to the diplomatic devastation. Specifically, I would
like to examine how President Joe Biden’s refusal to rejoin the
Iran nuclear deal unless Iran’s government meets ridiculous
preconditions is a massive error that could haunt him for the
rest of his presidency.
First, a little background. The current sanctions on Iran
were put into place in 2018 as part of former President Donald
Trump’s decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action, colloquially referred to as the “Iran nuclear deal.” Our
side of that deal was agreeing not to re-impose sanctions in
exchange for Iran not developing nuclear weapons. Since the
Iran nuclear deal was widely seen as one of former President
Barack Obama’s key foreign policy achievements, it was natural
that then-candidate Biden would support rejoining it. And,
to his credit, he technically hasn’t broken that promise. That
is because, even during the campaign, he stated that the U.S.
would only rejoin the deal “if Iran returns to strict compliance,”
which they have not done yet.
However, Iran has a good reason not to make the first step
toward compliance. We broke compliance first, not them. In
fact, not only did they not resume building nuclear weapons
until after we abandoned the deal, they did not resume building
nuclear weapons until last November, two and a half years later.
And they only did so after their top nuclear scientist, Mohsen
Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in an ambush that Iran alleges
was coordinated by the Israeli government. By any reasonable
standards of deal-making, it is incumbent on the party that
originally broke the deal to take the first steps toward restoring
it — therefore, the U.S. should initiate the return to compliance.
Even if Biden were to reverse course today and repeal
sanctions, it may be too late. Iran has a presidential election
this summer, and incumbent President Hassan Rouhani — the
moderate who signed the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 — cannot run
again because he is term-limited. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s breaking
of the Iran deal is widely perceived to have given an advantage to
the conservative, or “principlist” side, which has always opposed
the nuclear deal. After all, the principlists’ position in 2015 — that
the U.S. was not trustworthy — has been well borne-out by our
breaking of the deal. So, even if we were to return to the deal, it
is not likely that the next Iranian government will trust us to
maintain that compliance between administrations.
Additionally, while Trump is largely to blame for breaking
the deal in the first place and creating that mistrust, Biden’s
refusal to drop his preconditions sends an even worse message:
that neither U.S. party can be trusted to honestly and fairly
maintain the deal. Biden could have earned the reputation as
the president that at least tried to repair our broken relationship
with Iran. Instead, he will likely go down as the president that
solidified our diplomacy’s ruinous fate.
Moreover, regardless of if Iran chooses to go back to
upholding its end of the deal, we should go back to upholding
ours. First, it’s the right thing to do from a humanitarian
standpoint. Even if Iranians choose to elect a government that
wants to build nuclear weapons, that is still not a just reason to
continue to starve their people. Think tanks funded by large
defense corporations, which benefit from presenting Iran as
a threat, do not believe that Iran would use these weapons
offensively, so essentially we are causing immense pain to the
Iranian people to deny them the capacity to defend themselves.
But, more relevantly to our diplomatic interests, returning to
compliance with no immediate reward would show Iranians
that the principlist view of America is wrong and that we have
the potential to be an honest and trustworthy deal maker. And
while it is highly unlikely that the next Republican president
would maintain compliance with the deal, especially if Iran
doesn’t immediately stop building weapons, being an honest
actor half the time still sends a better message to Iran, and to the
world, than never being one at all.
Opinion
16 — Wednesday, April 21, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
SIERRA ÉLISE HANSEN | COLUMNIST
A
ccording to the bipartisan standards
by which political “truths” are
measured and spoon-fed to us, truth
has come to sound more like something to
aspire to rather than a lived, tangible reality.
If you are like the average person, surfing the
internet feels like a part of being alive. You
might feel as if you’re always consuming a lot
of information (primarily tweets and scandals
rather than Dostoyevsky), but nevertheless,
reading is a part of your day.
Especially given the ubiquity of the internet
amid the ongoing pandemic, one can assume
that many Americans have spent even more
time with their thoughts hovering in virtual
space than they did before. And, that’s in a
world which unapologetically centered the
internet during pre-pandemic times.
As someone who relied on libraries as
sanctuaries of focus before quarantine, I
had to implement huge adjustments in order
to focus at home. More than that, I simply
yearned for the feeling of holiness that would
pass over me as I opened a hard-bound book
from a time period that lapsed before I was
born. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to
reproduce anything close to it in quarantine,
and indeed I have not.
In direct opposition to a work of writing that
is developed over many weeks, months and
sometimes years, social media, like advertising,
is constantly being run through a machine
of algorithms and analytics. So, what are we
missing? Reading “for pleasure” is more than
a pastime — the slow simmering of processing
what we read can become a catalyst for the
mind’s steady growth. It is also a portal through
which knowledge can be tested; that is, if we are
granted access to that knowledge in the first
place.
I’d like to make an abrupt suggestion, which
is that we make a cultural shift toward an idea
that isn’t so new after all: We should center the
library as a mainstay of public life. Libraries are
so much more than spaces filled with materials
for personal consumption. Even in today’s era
of rampant dis- and misinformation, libraries
are still considered to be trusted, boasted public
institutions.
During an extremely scary, uncertain fall
semester when no one knew with any degree
of certainty that America’s democracy would
remain intact, it felt as if a constant swarm of
information was flowing through my brain
each day. It happened regardless of whether
I wanted it to or not. Like many of you, I was
confined to my apartment, which I often
resented. I continuously engaged in what has
been referred to as “doomscrolling” (or, in
an extension of that same modern parlance,
“doomsurfing”).
Doomscrolling felt like the only form
of control I was able to exercise over the
entrapment of those circumstances; I engaged
in it more so as a mechanism for distraction.
As we are all aware now as we were back then,
there was no control to be exercised at all, by
any one of us, over anything. Well, outside of the
act of stepping into the voting booth — maybe
even waiting in impossibly long lines to exercise
our right to vote.
But then I remembered something else that
has stuck with me throughout the pandemic-
induced lockdown. Despite how the shuttering
of libraries feels neutral, I realized that the
continuous pang of absence resulting from my
inability to step foot in a campus library was
more than a deeply personal experience — it
was the revelation of wanting to salvage the
social purposes of the public library. More
specifically, I remembered an op-ed in the
New York Times penned by Eric Klinenberg,
a sociology professor at New York University
professor, titled, “How Libraries Can Save
the 2020 Election.” I recall being struck
immediately by the content of the article at the
time that I happened across it.
While citing Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy’s decision to remove or cripple key
components of America’s mail system right
before the election, Klinenberg posits the
importance of libraries for collective use and
remedy. He writes that “there is a largely
overlooked part of the civic infrastructure that
is ready and able to help Americans exercise
the franchise (of voting), even under these
troubling circumstances: libraries.”
Immediately after reading that sentence,
I pondered my own experience with the
libraries of my youth — one of living inside
the articulations of time-worn fonts within
the concrete walls of my elementary school’s
library. I recalled nostalgically that this
childhood library had shelves lining the middle
of the school building, and that students would
walk past the bindings when going anywhere.
I remembered that sometimes, when I was
bored in class, I would steal away to these
shelves while “going to the bathroom” so that I
could read.
I also recalled James Baldwin discussing
the fact that he read in his local libraries not
out of a sense of boredom, but as an avenue
for fighting against the limitations imposed
upon him by the outside world — a world that
certainly did not want him to succeed or flourish.
Due to how Baldwin was a young Black man
in Harlem during the 1960s, an era when the
white status quo politicians aimed to viciously
and purposefully oppress Black intellectuals,
his life circumstances seemed to foreclose the
possibility of the success he would so memorably
achieve. However, while in conversation with
the anthropologist Margaret Mead, Baldwin
revealed that he’d read himself out of two
Harlem libraries by the time he was thirteen.
Baldwin also explained to Mead that
what he “had to do then was bring the two
things together: the possibilities the books
suggested and the impossibilities of the life
around (him).” As far as the latter goes, I see
many disturbing holdovers from the 60s when
Baldwin was honing his craft. Predominantly
Black schools in Detroit, Mich., are grossly
underfunded due to, among other things,
neglect resulting from demographic shifts
related to white flight. What this ultimately
means is that students from underfunded
school districts have less overall opportunity
to capitalize on something as intellectually
essential as access to literature — a dearth of
money translates easily in this case to a dearth
of access.
One conspicuous connection that can
be made here is that one known tool for
remedying a particular social malady —
that of the problem of access to reading
material in schools with Black, Indigenous
and other students of color — can be used to
remedy another urgent problem of access.
Public libraries are the systems by which
knowledge and opportunities to exercise
civil rights can be fairly distributed. We
must commit to maintaining and expanding
access through the stacks and shelves
outside of the University of Michigan
community.
Libraries are clearly an ideal starting
point for improving access to both civic-
minded activities and high-quality literature
for
historically
underfunded,
neglected
communities. They always have been, and
always will be.
Post-pandemic, we must value libraries more
JOHN TUMPOSKY | COLUMNIST
The “vaccination passport” debate is more nuanced than it appears
John Tumpowsky is an Opinion Columnist and can be
reached at jgtump@umich.edu.
BRANDON COWIT | COLUMNIST
Biden’s failures on Iran
Brandon Cowit is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at
cowitb@umich.edu.
Design by Madison Grosvenor
Sierra Élise Hansen is an Opinion Columnist
and can be reached at hsierra@umich.edu.
C
onservatism, as a political philosophy, espouses
a commitment to liberty, the market economy
and existing traditions and institutions. In the
United States, conservatives adhere to the traditionalist
principles in the Constitution and the values that the
Founding Fathers included in the documents that created
our nation. Essentially, conservatives want to conserve.
Incremental change should always be preferred to radical
change. Government involvement in our citizens’ lives is
overreach.
In the United States, the Republican Party is
ostensibly the party of conservatism. But recent action by
Republicans — politicians and citizens alike — contradict
many of the values they claim to stand for as conservatives.
For example, many businesses are considering
requiring that customers show proof of a COVID-19
vaccine before using their services. This is the free market
at work — privately-owned businesses implementing
guidelines that allow for access to their goods and services
should customers choose to adhere to them. But Gov.
Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., signed an executive order banning
businesses from requiring vaccine “passports.”
As a Republican, DeSantis should believe in the
independence of businesses and oppose government
intervention into their practices. But forbidding businesses
to do what they believe is best for them constitutes
interference. Additionally, the state of Florida requires
vaccinations to send children to school, both public and
private, showing that DeSantis’s actions are a political
ploy, rather than meaningful policy, as the polarization of
COVID-19 and its policies continues.
Another much, much more extreme example is the
storming of the Capitol. The actions of the rioters in
Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 were contrary to everything
conservatives should stand for. Violently attacking an
American institution neither upholds the Constitution nor
promotes incremental change — it, in fact, is the opposite
of both of those things.
If Republican politicians vehemently denounced this
event as soon as it occurred and continually held this
position, this wouldn’t represent how the Republican
Party
has
abandoned
conservatism.
But
many
Republicans refuse to accept what this event means for
the party and the country.
In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection on Jan.
6, one in five Republicans approved of the mob. Prominent
Republicans have spread the baseless conspiracy
theory that the rioters were actually so-called antifa
sympathizers, rather than supporters of former President
Donald Trump. There is no proof that this is true, but that
didn’t stop Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., from saying on the
House floor that there was “pretty compelling evidence”
that the people who stormed the Capitol were involved
with antifa.
Of course, there are examples of Republicans who
retain conservative principles. The Republican state and
local officials who spoke out against the false claims of
voter fraud did so because they believe in the integrity of
American democracy and in protecting the Constitution.
Further, on April 5, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., vetoed
a bill that would have restricted the ability of transgender
people to access health care because “the state should not
presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human
and ethical issue.” Still, these events became news because
they were surprising in a time where many of the opinions
held by Americans seem to be based on cultural division
rather than political ideology or philosophy.
Republicans have abandoned their adherence to small
government and traditional values and have fallen victim
to culture wars. Rather than focusing on crafting quality
policy, Republican politicians and citizens are focused
on opposing any action taken by the Democrats and
defending the so-called victims of cancel culture.
Republicans are bound to no ideology other than
providing an outlet for people disillusioned with the
Democratic Party. They have abandoned the political
and religious conservatism that has guided the party for
most of its history. While there are likely still Republicans
in office that abhor the policies and actions of their party,
they refuse to speak out against them. This could be
because they fear their voters and colleagues who fully
agree with the party’s recent initiatives, or because they
know staying silent is the best way to further their careers.
Parties are allowed to grow and change as time passes;
changing party platforms is what has allowed for social
progress and the changing role of government. But
the Republican Party isn’t adapting to current society.
The party is claiming to be conservative when its
actions prove otherwise, and it is advocating for things that
true conservatives would never want. If the Republican
Party were truly dedicated to conservatism, it would try to
apply the founding documents of the United States to the
current state of politics and society.
LYDIA STORELLA | COLUMNIST
Republicans aren’t conservative anymore
Lydia Storella is an Opinion Columnist and can be
reached at storella@umich.edu.
Design by Megan Young