VICTOR SCHMITT-BUSH
Assistant News Editor
I’ll admit it.
On Jan. 20, 2017, I was ecstatic. It was the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Few things in life could have satisfied me more than to see the devastated looks on the faces of every Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporter.
I wasn’t even a Republican, even though the political left was where most of my frustrations lied.
I didn’t lean left or right. I wasn’t even in the middle. I had no interest in being a part of any political party. I felt as if I was watching everything happen from a distance, but it’s not as if I wanted to see the world burn. What I wanted was for people, especially college students, to get a rude awakening.
From the top of my lungs I wanted to shout, “Political correctness will not save you! Feminism will not save you! Black Lives Matter will not save you! Only you can save you!”
I wanted to see people open up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, everything they’ve fought so hard for is just a farce, a box to put themselves in, a limitation. I wanted people to realize that their foundations, their belief systems, their passions, their biases, everything could shatter from beneath their feet at any given moment.
I thought that maybe Trump getting elected would make people rethink their worldview, and that more people would be emboldened to speak out against political correctness.
It would have been music to my ears to hear someone say, “Maybe you don’t have to be a part of some ‘heroic’ ‘morally superior’ group or society to be a good person.”
But in my own way, I was also self-righteous. I acted as if I was the most open-minded person on campus.
But I know damn well now that I wasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if my beliefs have been shaken to the core, but this college and the people in it have helped me to experience a paradigm shift that I never thought in a million years would have happened. And it was so simple.
Fredonia taught me how to listen. It’s what I was failing at as a journalist and as a student. I didn’t listen to people. I only heard what I wanted to hear. Consequently, I was no better than the people that I was speaking out against.
It took me until later in my junior year to get to this point, but I’m here now. This is my last semester as a Fredonia student, and I couldn’t be more thankful to the people at this college who have helped me to become who I am today.
I still fervently believe in the free market and exchange of ideas. I still feel that political correctness has run amok. I still reject many aspects of today’s feminist culture, and I still have some qualms about the moral integrity of the mainstream populists of Black Lives Matter, but over these few years, I’ve grown up.
I am not just willing, but excited to listen to and consider ideas from the perspectives of people who wholly disagree with me on these points.
Yes, I will still have political discourse with people and ask some questions that are likely to offend them.
But there’s one thing that I will never do again. I will never walk into an interview or a public event or a lecture with this preconceived notion that I already know everything that there is to know about it.
Perhaps one of the most influential people in my life to bring about this change was one of my greatest friends, Mam Deng, a recent graduate and molecular genetics major who was culturally and politically involved to such a tremendous extent on this campus that he had a profound effect on someone even as stubborn as me.
He introduced me to many different people with different ideas and belief systems, all of whom were respectful and kind and understanding of even my own ignorance. Hats off to such a wonderful and impactful student. Deng left this college and me better than it/I was.
This is what I believe: you should not be overbearing to others about your perceived ‘open-mindedness.’ Humble yourself in the presence of God, they say. Well, I see God in everyone. And I don’t mean that vaguely. I mean that in a literal sense.
If you are unabashedly prideful, then you are much more closed-minded than you think. That is not to say that you should not filter out ridiculous claims or asinine ideas. Have a genuine curiosity and search for truth on your own terms, but please for the love of God don’t be like Trump. Alternative facts are not a thing.
Speaking of God, I might not believe in the God of any religious texts, but I’ve always loved this quote.
“God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.”