Going to a private college, a lot of the students come from more privileged families that allow their children to be decked out in the most popular brands of clothing, driving the most expensive cars, and affording the best of technology. I had never thought of these students as better than myself despite their financial standings. Today in class, my professor addressed this subject that has been on my mind since the day of move in. In contrasting two opposites, we came to the discussion of Macalester College and our own University of St. Thomas. What do we wear? What do we drive?
The class was silent without answers. In my mind I was answering him with an endless list of overpriced name brands that I see on the daily around campus: LuLuLemon, Patagonia, North Face, etc. We continued on to answer the “easier question”, what do Mac students wear? That is if they wear clothes, of course. What do they drive? Trick question: they only ride bikes. If they were to go on a date, where would they go? A coffee shop or a park. Somewhere cheap. What do they drink? Cheap, nasty wine straight from the bottle. What kind of drugs do they do? The ones they grow themselves under a heat lamp.
Moving back to UST students, where would we go on a date? A nice restaurant and a movie downtown. What do we drink? What kind of drugs do we do? Trick question, we don’t drink or do drugs because we’re responsible Christian students. While answering all of these questions, the class laughed. It reminded me of what I think the snooty rich people of the 1800s did when talking about the people socially beneath them. I felt misplaced because I had no right to laugh at the Mac students. If anything, I related more to them than my own peers. I like riding a bike places. It saves energy and preserves the environment. Cheap dates are fun to me. I like adventuring around Minnehaha Falls with my boyfriend for the low price of $0.00. Cheap wine is nice after a stressful week of exams, lectures, and work. As I sat in class placing labels on students I only knew by their stereotypes, I had to relate it to how I imagine what our next four years as a country will be like.
Donald Trump is obviously a wealthy man. Whether it’s due to his amazing capabilities with money as a businessman or his escape from paying income taxes for X years, we attribute his success to the amount of money he has. We then take this amount of success and use it as a reason to elect him as our president. However, someone’s success shouldn’t be correlated to how much money they have. Here at St. Thomas, we pride ourselves on the motto “For the common good”, meaning that we are trying to work towards something more than simply making money. Instead, we are working towards making a positive impact through meaningful change. It all seems to contradict itself when you realize that UST is one of the most conservative colleges in the state. Wealthy parents favor the republican party because their policies work for them. Then their children learn and support these ideals and thus creating radical Millennials fighting for something they only partially understand. Little do they know that they are simply supporting a man who’s successful based on a financial standpoint rather than the entire concept that we stand by at our school.
Sitting in class, we casually joke about students at a cheaper school down the street. It makes me wonder when we will begin attacking our own peers because they can’t afford to wear name brand. When we begin to laugh at the students who have to work on campus to pay their own tuition because their parents aren’t getting the tax breaks that the other parents are getting.
I don’t know the future of America under Trump, but I do know my future. I’m attending the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota because of my passion for my future. While feminism under Trump doesn’t look promising, I do know that I will continue to support it. I’m going to take stances on topics that important to me despite how other people may feel about them. I will work hard and take the sacrifices that I need to take to get to where I want to be in the world. All the while, I probably won’t be wearing Vineyard Vines sweaters or carrying my books around in anything other than my clearance backpack. However, my success will never be measured on the money that I have in the pockets of my Target brand jeans. Unlike Donald Trump, my success will be measured by the thoughts that I express and the passion and love that I present to the world.
