I recently read an article titled, “Dear College Conservatives: I Don’t Care About Your Tears”. While I understand that college conservatives are not oppressed anywhere near the level other groups of people in this world are, I think this is something we do need to talk about.
Let me first start by saying that I am a college conservative myself, although I consider myself to be fairly moderate on a wide variety of issues. I would also like to again mention that there are many many other groups of people more oppressed than college conservatives.
I really want to make that clear.
There is a saying I often hear, “Just because someone out there has it worse than you, doesn’t mean you aren’t in pain and don’t have the right to complain”.
I’ll pause and let you make your own connections between this topic and this quote.
Are you laughing yet? If not maybe I need to also mention that the majority of the people who have told me this are liberal.
Okay, now are you laughing? I am.
If we take the meaning of this saying and apply it to the current topic at hand, the only conclusion we can possibly come to is that we cannot allow ourselves to discredit the oppression felt by anyone because there are other people who are oppressed more than them. Essentially, all forms of oppression matter and need to be addressed.
How can any group of people, especially one whose apparent mission is to fight oppression, feel that it is not only okay to make a group of people feel oppressed but to pour salt on the wound and tell them that their oppression does not matter because ‘they voted for the wrong person’?
Two quick thoughts about voting before I get back to the topic of oppression:
- How on God’s green earth would you know who I voted for unless you saw me fill in my ballot (gross violation of privacy, thankfully this isn’t the 1800’s anymore) or I told you? The fact that I lean conservative does not mean definitively that I voted for one person over another. It simply means that I agree with more conservative stances on issues important to me than I do liberal. That does not always translate into me voting straight ticket.
- Who gave you the right to determine who anyone should vote for? This is the United States of America my darling, here we are fortunate enough to have the freedom of voting however we choose to. That is something we should all be proud of, not diminish because the person you wanted to win didn’t.
Now I would like to provide to you the definition of oppression before we continue:
Prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control.
- The state of being subject to unjust treatment or control
- Mental pressure or control
While in some extreme cases, conservatives across college campuses are being subjected to unjust treatment because of their political beliefs, I want to focus specifically on the mental pressure and control college conservatives are indeed subject to during their education.
The entire year of 2016 was a year in which conservatives across the nation felt pressure to believe in liberal ideals because they were constantly demonized whenever the election was discussed, whether it be in class or just around campus. They also felt pressure to not express any of their viewpoints as they dealt with a very real fear of not only how students would treat them with their differing views but of professors prejudicing them for their beliefs and topics they discussed in essays and during class. Please do not pretend that this does not happen, because it does. They are being controlled to write about and discuss liberal issues as if they believe in them for fear of what might happen if they admit the truth, a form of coercive control tactics. When they do admit the truth and how they feel, they are subject to more control tactics, such as “Create strong aversive emotional arousals in the subject by use of nonphysical punishments such as intense humiliation, loss of privilege, social isolation, social status changes, intense guilt, anxiety, and manipulation”. These tactics are currently being used across the country both on college campuses and off of them as a very large part of the current liberal agenda.
Now let me ask you this, how can we as a society preach about and try to change only certain forms of oppression while we simultaneously force oppression on another group of people, simply because their beliefs differ?
What kind of effective change is this making?
Do we really want our children growing up learning that when people disagree with us, the right thing to do is oppress them through humiliation and control tactics?
If we ever want a chance of stopping oppression, I certainly do, then we need to not only stop causing it, but accept that it exists. Only then can we make any significant change.
“Be the change you wish to see in this world.” - Ghandi