4 — The Statement // Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Sarah Akaaboune: To write is to heal
The first person to edit and
publish my work was Neema Ro-
shania Patel for The Washington
Post. Neema died last October
and I miss knowing a world with
her in it. She believed in me when
not many editors from places like
The Washington Post believed in
18 year old girls, when the world
rarely ever made an effort to see
us or hear us or believe us, to
give our words the value and
weight they so truly deserved.
We spent an entire afternoon
working on an essay entitled “At
18, I’m facing a choice that will
define my adulthood: Should I
wear hijab?” There is a picture
in that piece of my grandmother,
and we weren’t yet heavy with all
the things that come with living.
I still loved girlhood and she still
loved me. I remember calling my
grandmother the day my story was
published and screaming into the
phone “GRANDMA GRANDMA
YOU’RE IN THE WASHING-
TON POST CAN YOU BELIEVE
IT? OH HOW I MISS YOU AND
I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU
AGAIN.” My grandmother died
three weeks later, the night be-
fore I began my freshman year of
college. I never did get to see her
again.
I joined The Michigan Daily
because Neema saw something in
me, and because I missed my grand-
mother, and mostly because I so
desperately wanted to heal. I spent
my first two years at The Daily at
Michigan in Color where I wrote
“To Restitute,” one of the most im-
portant essays I have ever written.
In it I wrote “writing about
your pain is a complicated mat-
ter; it demands courage and
bravery and power of will even
if what little you have left is di-
rected towards living instead. It
is an inherently violent act, in that
you must choose how much of it
the reader will bear, choose how
much they can handle, choose
what they’ll think afterwards and
choose how they’ll feel, choose
which pieces of you they’ll keep
forever,” because people listen
when you write in a way they nev-
er truly did before.
The Statement is the sort
of place that finds you and only
when you’re truly ready. It is
when healing is no longer entirely
a solitary endeavor, when healing
becomes about telling the world’s
stories instead, the kind of stories
that no one really seems to be able
to find a place for anywhere else,
stories about all the ways we love
and grieve, all the ways we come
undone and all the ways we learn
to live again. The Statement was
founded because journalism has
always been about people first,
about narratives and places and
lovely wonderful ways of living
that have so desperately needed
a voice. There is something about
The Statement that is so pro-
foundly humane, how our writers
find meaning in the most mun-
dane of places, in fake IDs and
train stations and fairy doors, and
mostly, in the places that people
never seem to look twice.
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
John Jackson: On protest as a
collective action problem
Tom Hayden’s work reached
me by fortunate accident, carried
on the wing of a friend who’d just
watched “The Trial of the Chicago
7,” and assured me its fast-paced,
witty drama was well-suited to
my own more political impulses.
Writer and director Aaron Sorkin
paints protagonist Hayden (Eddie
Redmayne, “Les Misérables”) as
a passionate but straight-laced po-
litical activist, and follows the chaos
that unfolds at a protest turned riot.
After watching the film, I imme-
diately called my father, who listened
patiently while I explained, frantic,
how there’d been a revolution: the
New Left crashed down on the Demo-
cratic National Convention in Chi-
cago. I’d missed it. The year was 1968.
I should’ve been there. At
The Daily, with Tom Hayden. In
the streets, defending friends from
police brutality. Atop lampposts,
shouting with a megaphone.
“Too bad there’s nothing to
protest anymore,” said my father.
His tone implied I needed to
take the hint: injustice hadn’t dis-
appeared, only my peers’ will to
spark revolution.
If protests from the left quiet-
ed, so too did I. If the Daily reported
in dignified silence, I stayed my hand
from more extreme words that need-
ed writing.
Tom Hayden marched for the
lives of the approximately 58,000
American soldiers who died in
the Vietnam War. When 7,000
American soldiers died in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Americans marched
again (along with Tom Hayden).
In the last five years, police offi-
cers have killed more than 5,000
Americans.
Now I wonder, how many lives
does it take to wake up a generation?
To claim a complete absence of
modern protest would be not only
negligent, but outright disrespect-
ful. Rather, I contend the relevance
of a protest to an individual consists
of its population and proximity.
Population’s inclusion as a
factor stems from the idea of the
collective action problem, the so-
cial dilemma taught in every intro-
ductory political science course.
For those uninitiated, professors
introduce the collective action
problem as a catch-all excuse for
poor citizen behavior, including
tax evasion, fossil fuel use, and
draft dodging. The lesson quickly
morphs, however, into an oversim-
plified explanation of lackluster
voter turnout:
If everyone votes, one vote
is meaningless.
If one vote is meaningless,
why bother voting?
Needless to say, a more harm-
ful theory has never been devised.
What could one vote save,
standing against millions?
Everything.
Hayden, via Sorkin, grapples
with the unparalleled importance
of voter turnout in “The Trial
of The Chicago 7” when fellow
revolutionary Abbie Hoffman asks
him,“Winning elections is the
first thing on your wishlist? Equal-
ity, justice, education, poverty, and
progress, they’re second?”
Hayden replies, “If you don’t
win elections, it doesn’t matter
what’s second.”
With a stable population of vot-
ers and protestors in hand, a given
movement impacts an individual
largely based on his or her proxim-
ity. Often, as a logical matter of
convenience, people protest in the
communities where they live. Such
protests, however, are not usually in
full view of those with the power to
enact change. Hence, citizens travel
to where their voices might be heard
loudest: at the White House gates,
the European Council, or the Dem-
ocratic National Convention.
If students march on the Diag,
who will hear us but ourselves?
As Hayden said, “If our
blood is going to flow, let it
flow all over the city.”
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Jeremy Weine/DAILY
Signage on I-69 points to Port Huron.
Reese and John laugh in the backseat en route to Port Huron.
A quiet strip of downtown Port Huron.