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.

