Category: Opinion

If someone asked you to give up a habit or start a new one for 40 days, what would it be?

This question came to me in the context of Lent, a period in the Christian calendar during which practitioners of the faith do just that. Giving up delicious but unhealthy beverages like soda or coffee is common, as is committing to a daily ritual of prayer, or some sort of fasting.

This year, I decided to give up Facebook.

On its face, the task is either straightforward and easy or immensely difficult, depending on one’s relationship with technology. For me, the difficulties were largely logistical. I have a job that requires me to use social media, and my duties for The Transcript mandate interaction with Facebook.

To resolve this I created a friendless alter ego on the site, one with administrative access to The Transcript’s page and other events I needed to advertise. In this way I gave up the “real” experience of Facebook — the endless notifications, the plethora of events, the links to trend pieces and BuzzFeed quizzes — without having to compromise my various obligations.

There are a few different reflections I’ve had since logging back on this past (Easter) Sunday — for instance, the relative ease with which any person can create a second self online, and the scary potential for deception that creates. Or what the fact that people get paid to use social media says about our culture.

But the main thing that’s been on my mind is the fact that I didn’t really miss Facebook one bit.

Sure, there were some messages I felt bad for delaying replies to, and some events I wish I had heard about sooner. But being back in the thick of the meaningless quizzes, the flurry of event announcements and the shameless promotion of selves and things has in three days created the same anxiety and tension in my Facebook use that it took me months to notice before.

This was the whole reason I chose to step away. I noticed that when I got on Facebook, my chest got heavy and my muscles tightened. I scrolled endlessly despite the fact that nothing was really interesting. The resulting procrastination only increased my anxiety about all the work I had to do. Facebook was having a rather prominent negative effect on me, both in the mental and physical realms. I got a lot angrier a lot faster. Something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel connected to my social world in the ways Facebook used to make me feel. I felt disconnected.

For me, this disconnection was also spiritual. In putting so much energy into a virtual realm full of performed Internet personas, I was becoming less rooted in the present and more detached from the weight of the air around me. It was harder to pay attention to and appreciate how incredible life itself is. Facebook was straining my connection with the rest of humanity and with God, or anything else out there that we can’t understand as humans.

Facebook is certainly an incredible thing. It helps us communicate in ways that would never have been dreamed of just a few decades ago. It’s a place to spread ideas and engage in dialogue. And, superficially, it connects us — it is a social network, after all.

But in my experience, there is a point at which the costs of a certain type of relationship with Facebook, and the Internet in general, outweigh the benefits. The tension, anger and anxiety I felt, the disconnection with myself, the world and everything in and around it, made me realize the chats, links and likes were not worth it.

I know not everyone’s relationship with Facebook is like mine. Checking it might not produce these same negative feelings. I am happy for and envious of these people, those who have been able to harness Facebook for its fullest good.

But to the rest of us, take a second and examine how obsessively checking to see how many notifications you have makes you feel. Is it good? Or is there some anxiety, some anger, some tension? If so, stepping away is not just acceptable — it’s healthy.

It’s no secret that I am a strong advocate for mental illness awareness and resources. I’ve written several columns about the issue in response to the changes in Counseling Services that have occurred over the last year. While our Counseling Services office is still in need of attention, I truly believe Ohio Wesleyan students take understanding and respecting mental illnesses very seriously. One of the biggest factors that led me to choose OWU was the student’s general sense of awareness, and in my time here I have seen students undertake remarkable efforts in speaking out about mental illness awareness.

The level of compassion and understanding towards mental illness at OWU was made even clearer to me yesterday, when I received a phone call from someone very close to me. He struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, and earlier that day the dean of students at his university called him into his office.

The dean told him someone had reported him for “making weird sounds” in the library, and that he needed to “control his behavior.”

He told the dean he was sorry for the disruption, explaining that he has conditions that make it difficult for him to sit still and ignore his ticks. He started crying, and told the dean he would refrain from using the quiet floor.

The dean responded saying that he should not use the library at all if his “he continues this very unusual behavior.”

The dean’s comment infuriates me for several reasons.

First, telling someone who just told you they have a mental illness that their behavior is “unusual” is not okay. The second element of the dean’s comment that I take offensively is his implication that the behavior can be controlled or stopped. If someone tells you he has a mental disorder, you cannot disregard the severity of that situation.

It’s like telling someone with an elephant on their back to “shrug it off,” without acknowledging the fact that the two tons of mammal on his shoulders might make it difficult to free himself.  If my friend could stop his “behavior,” he would. No one wants to take four hours to write a one-page paper because they can’t stop twitching.

Finally, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the dean’s response, to me, is that the dean clearly does not realize the severity of mental illness. Mental illness can be hard to understand, but it is so crucial that we as a society acknowledge it. It is a problem, and that’s why we shouldn’t make it worse by perpetuating a culture that does not take it seriously.

Hearing about this incident made me sadder than I can express, but it also made me proud of my school.

This university is in the midst of figuring out issues with Counseling Services, but I truly believe students in our community have been able to support one another and raise awareness over mental illness regardless. I’ve seen students here advocate for Counseling Services, talk freely on stage about their mental illnesses and support one another when we lose one of our students to mental illness.

I feel people here talk about mental illness and try to understand it. While my friend’s experience breaks my heart, it makes me proud to attend a school that takes so much pride in advocacy for all issues.

I’m not really sure when films about women teaming up to take down a man started to be seen as “girl-power” flicks, but they’re not.

In past years Hollywood has spit out films such as “John Tucker Must Die,” “The House Bunny” and a more recent creation that has caught my attention, “The Other Woman.” These films are being promoted as female-positive and are supposedly meant empower women, but are in fact doing quite the opposite.

“The Other Woman” is a movie that follows the story of three women who discover that they are sleeping with/dating/married to the same man and decide to “team up to plot mutual revenge on the three-timing SOB,” says the IMDb page.

The problem is that even though the message may be positive — women setting aside differences and working together to achieve a common goal — it is still male-centered. It is not empowering to women if all their thoughts, feelings, motives and ideas revolve around a man.

For some reason there is this widespread idea that the only way to have a supposedly strong female character is to pit her against men, to have her overcome some adversity caused by a man or to have her reject the other female characters.

In just under a minute, the trailer for “The Other Woman” already pits two of the female characters against each other in a physical altercation, accuses one of them of being a “stripper” based on her apparel and, in a joking manner, one of the characters says to another, “You don’t think you can take her?” in reference to the main woman discovering her boyfriend’s wife. I had to stop watching the clip after that.

One of the worst parts of films like “The Other Woman”, at least for me, is the type of press coverage they receive. A quick Google search of the film’s title pulls up articles such as “Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton are Hotter than ever for ‘Other Woman’” and “Kate Upton Dawns Bikini in New Clip from ‘Other Woman.’”

This coverage does nothing to promote the careers of the actors, directors or writers of this film; rather, the articles draw attention only to the positives and negatives of their physical appearances. This kind of objectification of females in film only adds to the gross overarching problem of misrepresentation in the media.

A film about three white, heterosexual, privileged women trying to get revenge on a white, heterosexual, privileged man is not progress for the mainstream entertainment business, an arena that desperately needs a reality check.

A debate that got rather heated and resulted in little meaningful compromise three years ago was resurrected this week.

Yesterday was the first meeting of a new Wesleyan Council on Student Affairs committee of students administrators and service providers (including Chartwells and Aramark) set to the task of fulfilling the 2011 resolution to make Ohio Wesleyan’s campus smoke-free.

The reasons behind the resolution are certainly sound. WCSA is rightly concerned about the negative health effects of tobacco and second-hand smoke, and the members’ interest in the campus’s health is commendable.

But I am very hesitant to align myself with any sort of claim that a smoke-free initiative is the correct way to do this.

First, it is rather unclear, at least in the current student body’s consciousness, what “smoke-free” actually means. Does it mean no one on campus will be allowed to smoke any kind of legal tobacco product, or tobacco substitute (like an electronic cigarette), under any circumstances? Or would WCSA follow many other universities and create designated smoking areas?

Materials WCSA sent out soliciting committee members indicated the organization wasn’t certain which of those solutions it would pursue, or if either was the right one. I hope determining a definition of “smoke-free” is one of the committee’s first tasks. If a definition exists in the 2011 resolution, I think it’s unfair to apply it to a student body whose makeup is almost entirely different from when the resolution was passed.

Vagueness is one of the most odious weaknesses a policy can have. A lack of specific definitions undermines a policy’s authority.

In creating these definitions and politices that follow from them, there is another thing WCSA must be mindful of — the insidious class implications a smoking ban or limiation would have in an environment like OWU’s campus.

Students are not the only ones who smoke. We often see people without whom the university would not be able to function smoking at any given place around campus. These are the people who cook and serve us our food, clean our residential and academic buildings, and maintain our landscaping and infrastructure. They are the most important people to this place. Without them, it would fall apart.

For many, it seems, smoking is a brief break from long days of work that more than likely doesn’t pay very well, from the criticism of the bourgeois students who do not know what that work is like. To take that stress relief away seems almost cruel.

In the same vein, not every student is bourgeois. There are students who work multiple jobs — not two five-hour-a-week gigs on campus, but multiple part- or full-time jobs — to study at OWU. And there are students who may smoke to relieve the stress of other troubles. Perhaps it’s not ideal in a narrow health sense, but it’s unfair of privileged people to deem that stress relief technique unworthy and subject to student regulation.

For these reasons, I am strongly skeptical of the notion that any sort of smoking regulation would achieve the health objectives behind it. Prohibitive, paternalistic policy is never a good answer — especially within this class dynamic. If WCSA decides it is, it ought to provide profuse resources to aid compliance with the policy.

On Tuesday night I was privileged to attend and photograph the dress rehearsal for this weekend’s performances of “Butterfly Confessions” and “The Vagina Monologues.”

I know the latter fairly well — I first read it for the introductory women’s and gender studies course and saw the Ohio Wesleyan production last year. Its power and beauty show through strongly this year, and it is just as important as ever that we as a campus community see it and hear what it has to say.

But “Butterfly Confessions” was entirely new to me, in more ways than one.

The work by Yetta Young is itself a new play. It’s only been produced a handful of times and is soon to be published. But on top of that, it gave me new knowledge from a perspective that is so routinely and unapologetically silenced — the voice of black women.

Black women’s lives are imposed upon by our political, economic and social institutions, and the media perpetually obscures these realities by presenting damaging stereotyped images of black women that are in many ways part of the legacy of slavery.

In the wake of these misrepresentations, white people and others come to believe them and consequently perpetuate the racism and misogyny that we as a society purport to be against. The fact is that mainstream media make it difficult for we who have not lived such an experience to relate to and understand black women. The misrepresentations are one of many components of racism that have inhibited our cognitive and emotional ability to identify with those we feel are alien to us.

“Butterfly Confessions” shatters these misrepresentations.

Contained in the show are powerful voices about issues particularly relevant to black women such as HIV/AIDS and incest, and about black women’s relationships with their families, spouses, lovers and each other. The stories within it are hilarious, moving and enlightening.

The OWU production is groundbreaking in a few respects: it is the first to be produced without Young’s involvement, the first on a college campus and the first with a multiracial cast. The latter fact gives it a unique and powerful multiplicity of voices that shows the play is neither particular to a handful of characters nor a monolithic, universalizing voice for black women.

As I sat in Gray Chapel on Tuesday night, the enormity of the space was not lost on me. I think it’s significant that “Butterfly Confessions” is being performed there because it symbolizes the incredible importance of its message and the size of the stake I and the OWU community as a whole have in seeing it.

At stake for us is our emotional capacity to relate to, understand and love our fellow human beings. Mainstream media portrayals inhibit this capacity with respect to black women — the misrepresentations alienate us from them and give us an incomplete picture of their lives.

In defying these misrepresentations, “Butterfly Confessions” is important because it has the potential to restore that capacity. It offers a voicing of black women’s experiences that hasn’t been filtered through corporate interests and hundreds of years of violent racism we are privileged to be able to hear such voices because they give us a more meaningful understanding of each other as a community.

Go into Gray Chapel with an open mind and an open heart on Friday evening. Both will be swelling with knowledge and love by the end of the evening.

By Nazar Zhadan
Guest Columnist

The situation in Ukraine is escalating by the minute. Four weeks ago on February 22, Ukraine was celebrating the victory over a crony political regime that came into power solely on lie, deception and, of course, the help of the Kremlin’s (the Russian government) economic support.

While the whole nation was mourning her fallen heroes, hundreds of brave soldiers named “The Heaven’s Batalion” and many more that continue dying in hospitals around Ukraine or abroad, Vladimir Putin was plotting a Plan B to delegitimize Ukrainian democratic revolution.

Peaceful protests sparked in late November of 2013 due to President Yanukovich’s refusal to sign the trade agreement with the European Union and, instead, signing a confidential agreement with the Kremlin.

While this event became a symbol of the Euromaidan, the frustration with political-criminal nexus that was running the country for the better part of its independence is what led to people’s uprising.

The president and his allies miscalculated the extent to which people of Ukraine became fed up with corruption and abuse of political power.

Once the protests started capturing global attention, the President of Ukraine and his gang of trusted ministers, judges, politicians, oligarchs, and advisors started plotting a scenario to stop the protesters.

Victor Yanukovich’s solution was to send armed police to ambush the camp of protesters in the middle of the night on February 18. The raid by Berkut police cost the lives of 25 protesters. Yanukovich thought that people would get scared and disassemble, but the exact opposite happened and more people across the country started mobilizing and making their way into the capital.

After long nights of standoff and provocations, protesters were able to hold on to the square. The climax of the standoff happened on February 20 when orders were given by the high-ranking individuals to position snipers on the roofs around the square.

This time the standoff was much more bloody and the country plunged into a revolutionary stage. Protesters made a clear demand for the president to step down or they would not stop until the government buildings are taken over. The president along with other high-ranking officials fled the country.

The revolution proved that people of Ukraine have the will and the ability to build a better future for their children. One can argue that it is hard to imagine a brighter future, when the country is facing a threat of default and an outstanding debt to Russia of $15 billion. It was estimated by Peterson Institute in Washington that the president, his family, and his allies have embezzled somewhere between $8 and $10 billion a year since 2010.

The Ukrainian economy has been in a hole since 1991 and transparent institutions never existed. One dramatic change happened when millions were standing side-by-side, singing national anthem and dodging the bullets…The overthrow of Victor Yanukovich brought neither celebrations nor peace of mind, instead country’s most southern region Crimea fell hostage to a well armed group of militants, wearing Russian army uniforms and driving military vehicles with Russian license plates.

Yet, according to Putin, those militants have no connection to Russian military.  Putin also gave orders to appoint Sergey Aksionov as Crimean’s Prime Minister.  The self proclaimed minister set up a referendum that would decide whether Crimea would remain a part of Ukraine or join the Russian Federation.

The referendum that happened on March 16 revealed the illegitimacy of the Russian occupation. Instead of domestic and international monitoring, people of Crimea had to vote under the supervision of armed Russian forces. There is no surprise that the exit poll numbers stated that 82.7 percent of the Crimean population voted with 97 percent voting to join Russian Federation. Those numbers were highly questioned by Kiev and the rest of the world.

Since August 24, 1991, the day of Ukrainian independence, the nation was divided into a nationalistic pro-European west and center, and a nostalgic pro-Russian east and south…In preparation to Russia’s move in Ukraine, the Kremlin made sure that all the independent media that could have hindered his plan was blocked.

The facts point out that Putin used propaganda on the air and ordered his people on the ground to create a sort of an aura that Russian-speaking people in the region are being threatened, oppressed and killed.

His timing was perfect, right after the Verhovna Rada (the Ukrainian high government) in its first days after the revolution decided to take Russian language off the list of Ukraine’s official languages.

This created a limited window for Putin to seize a control of Crimea by deploying Russian military forces that have been stationed on the Black Sea of the coast of Crimea since 2010.  It is not clear whether Putin was expecting the same scenario as in Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that Russian military seized in 2008, but the response from Ukrainian military was different. Ukrainian soldiers did not retaliate with fire, making Russian invasion even more illegitimate.

The threat of illegitimacy and international isolation does not scare Putin. Some politicians believe that Putin is borderline schizophrenic, but others believe that Putin is seeking confrontation with the West in order to blame Russia’s economic downturn on the sanctions imposed by the West.

Putin has made attempts to secure the assets of elites by warning them to repatriate their money. Whether this strategy has been successful will be seen once the sanctions go into an effect.

Despite Putin’s intent, what is happening in Ukraine not only disregards all the democratic values and breaks a dozen international laws, but it also sets a very dangerous precedence for rewriting other nations’ borders.

The critical question is whether Putin will realize the mistake he is making and the precedence he is setting before it is too late.

Crimea by itself does nothing for Kremlin’s grand plan and only cause more problems. Crimea is highly dependent on the mainland Ukraine for water, gas and electricity. If Ukraine cuts off the supply, then it will become Russia’s problem.

Frankly speaking, if Russia takes Crimea away, breaking all the agreements through an illegitimate referendum, then it would be difficult to see why Ukraine would continue its supply.

Thus, what Putin really needs are the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine in order to solidify Russia’s dominance and confirm his status as the “rebuilder of the former Soviet republics.”

Mr. Putin has showed the strength of his stance by completely disregarding any threats from the European Union and the United States.

If their words carry little weight, then the only solution might be action. It is time for Ukraine and its supporters to turn empty threats into actions.

Nazar Zhadan, a senior, is from Kiev, Ukraine.