Why, in our fight for demarginalizing minorities and women, do we insist on marginalizing and bashing white republicans? Instead of constantly telling us how your town was so awful and full of racists and homophobes, why not try to educate them on why they should think otherwise? Instead of learning from each other and having meaningful discussion, we isolate anyone who isn’t of a particular viewpoint and assume that they are an awful human being with no morals. Some of these people may be of an older generation, and not really understand what they never grew up knowing. It concerns me that our first instinct is to discard them and play the blame game, instead of trying to actually have debates and engage with them. As someone who grew up surrounded by these people who everyone writes off, they aren’t evil. They are usually open to conversation about why you think differently, and you even (WOW!) might get them to agree with you. But we will never know if we don’t try.

I write this as a concerned college freshmen, who in her Women's and Gender studies class has noticed so much of this and more. While I was thought of as the “token snowflake” in my town and within my family friends, I now realize I am more independent than I might have anticipated. This is not because I don’t still agree with liberals on many social issues, but I also understand that the way things are going I don’t really want to be associated with any party. When I started to become more involved in politics, during my junior year of high school, I thought the democratic party was open and accepting, and so I aligned myself more with a liberal mindset. My motto will always be “you do you” and so who was I to tell anyone else how to live their lives? I just wanted someone in power who would support those who weren’t acting or living within the norm. Now that I am surrounded by those in this mindset, I have had to rethink my views and see that what I thought was happening was simply a pipe dream. Maybe it is happening elsewhere, but where I am at this particular time I can only see blaming and playing the “pity card”. In order to make change, you have to fight for it. Change will never happen while we sit around in a classroom and whine about how these “awful racists” are infringing upon our lives.

I guess I never will know if my thoughts on this are because of my upbringing, or in spite of it, but I don’t truly care to find out. What I know for sure is that in order to see change in the world, we have to be the ones to do something about it.