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.