Walking into the Tang Museum last Tuesday night, I was electric with hope. I had not realized it until then, when I sat down under a curtain of American flags among dozens of people with shared dreams and full lives ahead of them. Being on a college campus for my first presidential election was liberating, on a scale larger than I ever could have imagined.
Waking up on November ninth to the sound of my roommate’s alarm, she turned to me, half asleep and asked “Is Donald Trump our president?”.
From that morning on, the atmosphere on campus has been different. The electricity died and was replaced by solemnity, but as the days have gone by I have felt that energy return in a new, different way. I have heard complaints that “liberals are overreacting”, and that they need to “stop complaining”, but the ways in which the students on this campus have dealt with an unforeseen election outcome have been positive, productive, and not in the least apathetic.
Being in high school for this election, or even being an adult out in the professional world, makes for such a different perception of what this means for us. In college we are in a way station between education and careers, almost at the beginning of a new stage in our lives but not quite there yet. Preparing in theory to go out into the real world, but not being able to leave makes for an interesting dilemma. How do we make a change? How do we make our voices heard? It makes for an environment of kinetic energy, of students ready to go out and change the world who still have to fulfill their major requirements and wake up for 8 am classes. By expressing thoughtful reactions on social media, by putting up signs spreading love and positivity, we are doing what we can to be a part of the community at large.
From offering a course called “What Now?” about where our country is headed under a Trump presidency, to fostering discussion in our usual classes, Skidmore has given us the opportunity to thoughtfully process the election, and made it clear that now is not the time to sit around and mope. Now, more than ever, we have a responsibility to make the most of our education and the accepting community that we are a part of. Political affiliation aside, I count myself as lucky to have been on a college campus during this election season. Young adults are the future of this country, and I have seen a fire ignited within many of us that is sure to translate to incredible leadership in the coming years.
