I remember quite vividly the time I participated in my high school’s beauty pageant. It was exclusively open to juniors, and I signed up to both make a statement and participate in a multi-generation tradition. My parents had just gotten divorced and our small-town community had become involved in it (this is as far as I will go into the issue here), and I was trying to complete the rest of high school as normally as I could.
During the “evening gown” segment of the pageant, the emcee read out answers to a questionnaire that we had submitted as an introduction to our walking, posing, and twirling across the school auditorium stage. Here I stood behind a closed curtain, seventeen, with my then four-year-old tuxedo-clad cousin in hand as my escort. We were asked on the questionnaire to talk about someone we admired. Most of the girls chose their teachers, relatives, people from church, and so on, and kept their answers very homely (there was nothing wrong with that; I just wanted to take a different route). I chose Hillary Clinton.
It was 2008, right in the middle of her first primary run. I spoke about how much I admired her courage when it came to running for president against a sea of men and how that encouraged so many young girls, myself included, to seek their dreams. I remember feeling so enlightened just by the fact that she was out there trying. She had made it through adversity with grace and strength when it came to an upset in her family dynamic, and I could really identify with that at the time.
I thought I had met public scrutiny before, but it was breathing fire down the back of my neck in that specific moment. This pageant was by far my school’s most popular stage event, and there were hundreds of people in that auditorium, booing as loudly as they could in solidarity. Against me. Because I had an opinion that wasn’t the popular one. I remember reassuring my little cousin as my anxiety increased and realizing that Hillary Clinton deals with this kind of thing on a daily basis.
Eight years later, I find straying in opinion from others (especially the people I grew up with and the older community of my hometown) to be more uncomfortable and risky than it was then. The preaching of divisiveness and superiority of one group over another is a problem. The use of hurtful language and slurs that has become acceptable as of late is horrifying. I should not have to be complacent about exercising my right to have a conversation, and I have realized that I no longer find joy in discussing political issues. There is simply too much erratic behavior to circumnavigate, and I've already got too much on my plate as it is.
What I will say is this: I was with her then, and I'm with her now. So go ahead and boo.
