Wednesday, October 27, 2021 // The Statement — 4
By E m i ly Blu mb erg,
Statement Contributor &
Assistant News Editor
Content warning: Gender-based violence
O
ctober is a month of thrilling traditions.
Smiling pumpkins carved with love,
horror movies viewed from a comfort-
able couch, coffee filled with the overwhelming
sweetness of pumpkin spice.
Like Starbucks pumpkin cream cold brews,
my excitement had been brewing long before the
calendar pages turned. I even had a reminder set
for Oct. 1 reminding myself to plan my Halloween
costumes. We were deciding between hippies and
princesses.
Yet, on a bright and warm Oct. 2, as my friends
and I paraded through the fall wonderland of the
Ann Arbor Farmers Market in Kerrytown, terror
quickly began to messily weave its way through
the Ann Arbor community.
First, it was in our sorority GroupMe. Then
a friend’s private story. Then a club Slack chan-
nel. Eventually, a campus-wide email. Genuine,
uncertain fear ran through every vein of our cam-
pus as the threat spread like a flaming, destructive
wildfire.
“On October 4th, I’m going to the University
of Michigan and blow away every single woman
I see with an AR-15,” the now-deleted post read.
“There is a violent pro-male revolution coming
and you people better get ready for it.”
This message was originally posted on a Rus-
sian anonymous confession website called Sinn
List, inaccessible to typical search engine users.
The idea of the site was that people could profess
their most twisted, disgusting opinions, and other
users could approve or disapprove by responding
with either a right side up or upside-down cross.
At the start of a month meant for the controlled,
detached fearfulness of horror movies and haunt-
ed houses, we suddenly faced real, pervasive fear.
As a reproductive rights rally marched through
the streets of Ann Arbor, darkness began to spread
around campus in the form of a misogynistic blog-
ger professing intent to eradicate our female pop-
ulation.
By 5 p.m. on that gloomy Saturday, the FBI
interviewed a resident of the home from which
the threat was posted. Based on their investiga-
tion, they said, “there (was) nothing to indicate
imminent harm to our community.”
On Sunday, University President Mark Schlis-
sel announced that classes and activities would
take place “as scheduled” on Monday, regardless
of significant concerns and the creation of a peti-
tion with over 1,200 signatures. And while some
professors did opt to make their Monday classes
remote, others did not, with these decisions made
on a professor-by-progressor basis.
With no campus-wide accommodations on
that Monday, many women were given no choice
but to place themselves in the uncomfortable posi-
tion of walking around a campus painted with a
potential death threat. Regardless of the Univer-
sity’s vague claim of mitigation, it seemed as if
very little g was done to increase student safety as
we were forced to go about our lives as planned.
It seemed as if the University had decided that
ensuring students took their chemistry exams as
scheduled was more important than the comfort
of the people who keep the campus alive.
If we have learned anything in the trauma of
the last two years, it should be that student health,
mental and physical, should come before the rigid
scheduling and workload of college academics.
As if the laughable wellness days and month-long
Counseling and Psychological Services waitlists
weren’t enough, the way the University handled
this threat surely cemented to me that student
well-being is not high enough on their list of pri-
orities.
The day was relatively normal, aside from the
fact that campus hadn’t felt emptier since the peak
of the pandemic. After hours of internal debate,
I decided to go to the Shapiro Undergraduate
Library to get some work done. After about an
hour, I noticed that I did not see a single other
woman throughout the entirety of the somewhat
crowded third floor.
A
s the afternoon came to a close, my
friends and I sat in our living room and
haphazardly wondered what the f*ck
we were supposed to do next. Sure, the threat
said there would be a shooting on Oct. 4. But what
was stopping the poster, or anyone for that mat-
ter, from coming the day after? Or the day after
that? What is the University doing to protect the
women on their campus beyond the moments
when they are forced to act?
In a nation with poorly limited gun control
and relentless violence against women, we are
forced to deal with these terrifying realities as
we go about our daily lives. Fear is unlimited,
constantly lurking far beyond the constraints
of an annual October rewatch of “Friday the
13th.” Halloween may last a mere 24 hours, but
real fear is not confined to an elaborate dress-up
holiday.
In some ways, we have come to accept much
of the impending danger we may face. It can be
extremely beneficial to live effortlessly, refusing
to allow the sheer risk of being alive to waste our
lives away. But when situations like this arise,
our very real fears waste away into passive igno-
rance. After Monday, Oct. 4, there was no more
talk about the threat or its implications. The
dreaded day had passed, and we were supposed-
ly free to continue on with our lives as if nothing
had ever happened. Because, technically, I guess,
it didn’t.
Sadly, the next time we will have anything
close to a major campus discussion about women’s
safety will probably be the next time we receive a
threat of this nature. We are all too good at ignor-
ing societal ills until they are staring us dead in the
eyes and we are no longer physically able to look
away. It is a staring contest that we are almost
always losing. The immediacy of our fear sub-
sides, and issues no longer deemed “timely” fall to
the wayside until they inevitably circle back to our
focus once again.
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