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.

Design by Katherine Lee 
 

Page Design by Sarah Chung
t a n g i b l e fe a r

