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

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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

