Content warning: mentions of gun violence. O n the morning of April 17, 1981 — Good Friday — I awoke in my dorm room to the clanging of the fire alarm at the un-student-like hour of 6 a.m. Like most college students, I scoffed at the interruption. I wasn’t prepared to pull myself from a morning’s sleep, so I listened for footsteps or slamming doors out in the hallway, as if my fellow students’ behavior was ever any sort of barometer for emergency preparedness. I reluctantly tumbled out of the lofted bed and peered down the hallway. Not a soul heading for the exits. Everyone was asleep like I should have been. All indications of a false alarm. I tried to get back to sleep. Finals were just weeks away and I knew rest would be in short supply. I’m sure I was still awake when I heard the sirens squealing outside. I was a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan. I still hadn’t settled on a major. I lived in Bursley Residence Hall on North Campus, a bus ride from Central Campus. North Campus was in its infancy in 1981 as the University started relocating all the engineering, art and architecture programs from Central Campus. North Campus at that time was a bucolic environment, with tree-lined walking paths and gentle hills for winter traying (sledding on lunch trays). Removed from the more frenetic Ann Arbor campus area, North Campus was an oasis of sorts. I had planned to stay most of the weekend in Ann Arbor even though it was Easter. I planned to be home for Sunday dinner, but I cherished whatever uninterrupted study time I could get, especially in the quietude of this near-pastoral setting. As the sirens’ roars grew thunderous, I pulled aside the stiff residence hall room curtains. Our room’s window faced the circular drive that ran past Bursley’s main entrance. The firetrucks, police cars and ambulances were all parked along the oval strip. What a massive false alarm, I thought. I saw police and medical responders going in and out of Bursley’s front doors. A stretcher with an unidentified person was being whisked toward an ambulance. The IV bag shook in the transport. Another identical white gurney, unknown occupant, hurried out into another ambulance. By now, there was stirring in our dorm hallway. As I watched the scene below, someone joined me at the window. Pointing toward the departing ambulances, he said, “One of them is our Doug.” Over that nearly completed school year, my awareness of gun violence had surged. This current swelling of interest was the result of a flurry of shootings of celebrated and famous people. In December 1980, John Lennon was gunned down in front of his New York City home by a fan asking for an autograph. A scroll ran across the bottom of our hand-me-down TV set that night while we watched Monday Night Football: Ex-Beatle Dead. 40 years old. On March 30, 1981, another crazed person fired several rounds at President Ronald Reagan. The president’s communications chief sustained severe and lifelong head trauma. A valiant Secret Service agent took another bullet. The last slug ricocheted and struck Reagan as he was being rushed from the mayhem into his limousine. In the emergency room, doctors found the bullet precariously close to Reagan’s heart. I was pasted to the activity around the residence hall’s front entrance. In time, a man exited, escorted by two policemen. The handcuffed man was hastened toward an awaiting police cruiser, and then he was gone too. At some point, the emergency vehicles departed and peaceful Bursley life had the illusion of normalcy, though we all knew at that instant our college experience had been profoundly altered. Then on May 13, 1981, a Turkish assassin fired four bullets from a Browning Hi-Power semi- automatic pistol at Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square. All four bullets entered the Pope as he greeted the faithful from his Popemobile. Though gravely wounded, the Pope would recover and eventually forgive his assailant in his prison cell. It didn’t take long for word to bolt throughout the dorm that two students had been shot in another wing of Bursley. The assailant tossed Molotov cocktails from his room onto the floor’s hallway, igniting the carpet which necessitated the fire alarm. As the students hurried from their rooms, hindered by the smoke and chaos, the assailant came back out of his room with a sawed-off shotgun and fired into the cloudy hallway. The students I saw leaving Bursley on stretchers were undergoing surgery. One victim was our hallway’s resident advisor, Doug, who left his room to locate the source of the alarm, as required by dorm protocol. He was a senior and was set to graduate in a few weeks. The other, a freshman, was acting as the assigned fire marshal for his floor, tasked with ensuring his hallmates’ safety. It didn’t seem long before we learned that Doug and the freshman had died. Disbelief became chaos as students dashed about trying to get assurances to frantic parents. Apparently, the local news limited their coverage to a developing story of an early morning shooting at Bursley Hall on the University of Michigan’s North Campus. I finally reached my mom. TVs and radios throughout the dorm were loudly blasting news reports. Soon, news trucks and reporters interrupted the quiet of North Campus. The University immediately committed counseling services to us affected students. I can no longer remember the exact details of what I did for the remainder of that day. I called my mom back and pleaded with her to pick me up that afternoon — as soon as possible. The sudden attention to our tiny community was unsettling. Go home for the weekend, study for finals there and be coddled by parents in my old cocoon. That summer was spent back home working as a custodian at our local church. I cleaned, stripped and waxed all the classrooms in the church’s grade school — the same school I had attended not all that long ago. I took great pleasure in telling my old grade school teachers about my college experiences as they dashed in and out of the building throughout the summer. I found solace in this little school, where so much of me had been formed and molded. It had been such a nurturing period in my life, with all the exhilarating exploration and innocent wonderment that comes with learning — virtuous in itself. At some point that summer, I sat in my old bedroom with my new Corona electric typewriter I bought so I could type my college papers, and I banged out my thoughts on this last school year. I sent my little essay to our weekly community newspaper. My short piece recounted the various shootings — Reagan, Pope John Paul II and my two dormmates — and its impact on a 20-year- old student not yet fully launched into life. The paper published it in their editorial section and titled it something like “Mom, Apple Pie and Guns.” My new vision of the American Dream — my new understanding of myself. Seemingly. Eventually, the gunman was prosecuted and sentenced. It was a week-long trial. The assailant was in his senior year. I didn’t know him and had never seen him before. Apparently, the night before the shooting, he was frantically finishing a key paper for one of his classes, only to miss the filing deadline by moments. The charged man raised the insanity defense, mimicking John Hinckley’s successful defense in his trial for the attempted assassination of President Reagan. The defense failed and he was sentenced to life in prison. I wonder what the gunman thinks about in prison, what he thinks of guns now. My fear of guns relates back to my early childhood. After playing “war” with fake guns and knives, I was often left trembling, consumed with images of death much too vivid for any 10-year- old child. In reality, my personal exposure to guns was make- believe: comic book gun violence in movies and on TV. The real warzone was in Detroit and other inner cities, not the safe and comfortable suburb where I grew up. I was irrationally agitated by guns if I gave them any real thought. I did nothing about it, though I suspected my fears exceeded those of people I knew. I avoided guns and any place where they likely prevailed. And that was the extent of it — both my trepidation and my desire that guns be less prevalent. Graduating after two more uneventful years, I went on with my life. I went to law school and took a job at a major company where I practiced law for more than 30 years and retired to begin the next chapter of my life. During my adult life, I wasn’t oblivious to the escalating number of mass shootings and the resulting polarization of the country on gun control. I watched the litany of shooting rampages across the nation. I saw the Parkland students stand up for sane gun laws. I witnessed the Newtown massacre. I even read the inevitable articles for or against gun control that follow every mass shooting. I was aware of the NRA’s increased political clout and media influence. T ikTok trends come and go, but one that I can’t stop thinking about is “weaponized incompetence.” The template for this trend is quite simple: Show how poorly tasks are done when the person expected to do them is simply incompetent. These videos are usually meant to shame the person targeted by the video, or for the creator to get some consolation from the internet. However, I find this less important than the presence of weaponized incompetence beyond my For You page. It saturates our lives, yet we rarely seem to recognize its many forms. Essentially, this is the mindset of someone weaponizing their incompetence: “If I do a bad job, then no one will ask me to do it again.” It’s not ignorance, and it’s not incapability: It is a purposeful unwillingness to try. It is TikToks of women asking their partners to do a household chore or task, only to be met with such poor results that they end up doing it themselves. And when it comes to doing the task again, they won’t want to ask their partners. This isn’t just a TikTok phenomenon, either. Women ages 15 and older end up doing an average of two more hours of housework daily than men in the same age category. This additional work goes unnoticed in many cases — 59% of women say that they end up doing the majority of the household work but only 34% of men agree that their partner does more work. In heterosexual partnerships, this disparity must only be widened by men who leverage weaponized incompetence to thrust the least desirable tasks onto their partners. Considering how weaponized incompetence works within heterosexual couples is usually where thinking about the subject begins and ends. However, it’s much more widespread. Acknowledgment of this mindset existed long before any TikTok trend. A Wall Street Journal article dating back to 2007 coined the term “strategic incompetence,” describing it as an “art” and “skill” that can be used in the office for tasks that someone doesn’t want to do. The article suggests that this behavior is ingrained in us at birth. As children, we pretend not to know how to do chores when our parents ask us; as adults, we continue this behavior. Even though the article, in comparison to TikTok, takes a more positive view of weaponized incompetence, the fundamental premise remains. Weaponized incompetence could be considered a universal experience. Plenty of us have experienced the shortfalls of other people’s incompetence. Exhibit A: The sighs and groans that fill a room when a professor brings up a group project. The sadly all-too-common situation is where one group member falls short, and the other members have to work harder to complete the project, only for all the members to receive the same grade. It’s a frustrating task, working with someone that chooses to not do the work, or even worse, they do the work so poorly that someone has to fix it for them. Other students are forced to fill in the gaps left by those who purposefully choose to slack off with the hopes of banking on the competence of their group mates. Weaponized incompetence doesn’t end with simple tasks — it also damages our politics. People in positions of power are able to claim ignorance or dismiss the complexities of problems that they don’t want to discuss or fix. Despite the headlines about critical race theory in recent years, seven in 10 Americans don’t know what critical race theory is. The same study found that 52% of Americans support teaching the legacy of racism in schools, compared to the 27% of Americans who support critical race theory being taught in schools. To fully understand the legacy of racism today, it’s necessary to learn about systemic racism. You can’t have one without the other. Weaponized incompetence in these situations persists when people vehemently oppose something they don’t even care to understand. To admit that critical race theory should be taught in schools would be to admit that white privilege prevails within the legal system and policies. This is something that most Republicans don’t want to do, in order to keep legitimacy in the racial system established. Hence, they claim ignorance of the privilege they hold. Opinion Op-Ed: Good Friday, 1981 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 9 — Wednesday, March 15, 2023 Weaponized incompetence is deeper than a TikTok trend JAMES SWARTZ U-M Alum JAMIE MURRAY Opinion Columnist Design by Kim Ly 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. SHANNON STOCKING AND KATE WEILAND Co-Editors in Chief QUIN ZAPOLI AND JULIAN BARNARD Editorial Page Editors 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. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Ammar Ahmad Julian Barnard Brandon Cowit Jess D’Agostino Ben Davis Shubhum Giroti Devon Hesano Jack Kapcar Sophia Lehrbaum Olivia Mouradian Siddharth Parmar Rushabh Shah Zhane Yamin Nikhil Sharma Lindsey Spencer Evan Stern Anna Trupiano Jack Tumpowsky Alex Yee Quin Zapoli JULIA VERKLAN AND ZOE STORER Managing Editors Read more at MichiganDaily.com Sex won’t solve your loneliness E ven as we inch further away from the apex of the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of isolation are ever present. While its toll on our physical health has been at the forefront of our minds, this pandemic’s most profound and lasting effects are on our mental health. Before COVID-19 hit, loneliness was already a problem that had been exacerbated by technology and social media. The solution to all of this? More sex, at least according to Magdalene J. Taylor, author of “Many Such Cases,” who explained her thinking in a recent op-ed for The New York Times. If you’ve ever wondered what George Michael’s 1987 song “I Want Your Sex” (parts one and two, of course) would look like as an op-ed, this would be it, right down to the lyrics “Sex is natural, sex is good; not everybody does it, but everybody should.” Taylor’s assessment of the loneliness epidemic is no doubt correct that the solution is social connection, but misguided in tendering sex as the solution. The argument is flimsy, maintaining that people are lonely because they struggle to find sexual partners, and the resolution to this issue, she concludes, is to… have more sex? Akin to “If you’re depressed, just be happy,” sex is the logically inconsistent solution to a moral panic over sexlessness that Taylor amplifies then backtracks. What’s most telling about the piece, however, is the fact that sex is conflated with intimacy. While, yes, there can often be overlap between the two, they are certainly not synonymous: Sex can be either intimate or non-intimate, and intimacy itself can encompass a whole host of other ways of connection and is incredibly varied from individual to individual. For one, sex is not an inherent good, but a neutral act with benefits and consequences. While the benefits of sex that Taylor points out, such as reducing stress and lowering blood pressure, are real, sex also comes with its own set of cons, such as STIs and, as various comments on the op-ed point out, unwanted pregnancies in a post-Roe America where even contraception is threatened. To argue as Taylor does — that “Sex is intrinsic to a society built on social connection” — is to fall into the naturalistic fallacy, to believe that what is natural is inherently good or right. As we know, sex is not always a meaningful connection for some, whether it’s a one-time feeling or related to one’s sexual orientation. Sex can even be a defense against emotional intimacy: Erotic transference is a phenomenon that occurs especially in therapeutic spaces, describing how patients often feel amorous attraction to their provider in resistance to the weight of bearing intimate fears and anxieties. By intertwining sex and intimacy and speaking to a sexual naturalistic fallacy, Taylor’s piece becomes an example of the compulsory sexuality rampant in contemporary culture. Born from the term “compulsory heterosexuality,” referring to the assumption that a heterosexual relationship is the default, compulsory sexuality refers to the assumption that every person experiences sexual attraction and desire, that anyone uninterested in sex is missing out on something that is, as Taylor puts it, “one of humanity’s most essential pleasures.” This idea that desire for sex is what normal people feel — and that sex is a supreme form of pleasure — devalues acts of intimacy that aren’t sex (as well as relationships that aren’t sexual.) It not only excludes people who are uninterested in sex as a means of connection, but limits the types of intimacy we can find in relationships of all kinds. With friends and family, intimacy can mean devoting time to similar interests or meaningful conversation. Even with partners, intimacy need not be limited to sex when it can span from the physical to the non-physical, from cuddling to quality time. To restrict intimacy to sex alone means dwindling all the possible connections you can discover. There are solutions aplenty to our loneliness epidemic. With a loss of connection to local institutions due to the pandemic and other larger factors at play, many have lost connection to others as well as a sense of purpose. By focusing on rebuilding these institutions to create thriving communities, lonely individuals can find themselves with a whole host of options for social connection in their everyday lives. At the individual level, don’t limit yourself to the possibilities of who might play a meaningful role in your life. Have safe, consensual sex if you’d like, regardless of whether or not you’re looking for romance or social connection. AUDRA WOEHLE Opinion Columnist Read more at MichiganDaily.com Read more at MichiganDaily.com