Hate crimes adding to poor reputation of campuses
Allyson Yund - February 28th, 2008It’s incredibly saddening that hate crimes are occurring here on campus, especially since university campuses are increasingly being portrayed as unsafe by constant affronts of violence by and to students.
Most of us came here to learn the things that somehow are supposed to have slipped through our parents’ grasp when they were instructing us in our formative years.
Most of us came to learn the mechanisms by which the world works to make it a better place—or at least, contribute to society insofar as to make a paycheck.
Yet, in the wake of the threats to two students here on campus – which were merely based on minor details as to who they are in the grander scheme of life – these worldly goals of academia and knowledge all feel hollow.
If we cannot learn to come together as a community, unify our purposes by setting aside these minor quibbles, when will we ever truly achieve social justice for all?
Maybe social justice on a large scale can wait; it certainly hasn’t been important enough in the past millennia to come to fruition, so there must not be an impending need for any immediate action.
Those of us who do not choose a transgender or homosexual lifestyle certainly do not need to stand up for the safety and well-being of those who are, by way of this logic.
So we play the little game of escalation, as humans are wont to do. Somebody issues a threat. Retaliation occurs.
Threats abound, violence enters stage left, weapons of hate are unsheathed—and all the while we are hashing out whether to align ourselves with the Montagues or Capulets.
In the end, nobody is right.
The Nazis did it in WWII. They persecuted thousands of people based on one man’s definition of unacceptable social deviance from what he considered healthy and normal, an insignificant detail when considering more than 3 million lives were lost in the process of persecution alone.
Because we lack the unity and the gumption to stick together despite glaring differences and clashes of beliefs, we lose our resilience and our ability to thrive as a community.
We should stand up for each other because we are different; the search to tear each other down in an attempt to conform only adds to the problem.
While we bicker and ignore injustices around us, a few clever and efficient elite manage to take away what is most precious to us for personal gain: our families, our livelihoods, our freedom and our identities.
Pastor Martin Niemöller said it most profoundly and simply after his experiences in Nazi Germany:
“First they went after the Communists,
and I did not stand up, because I was not a Communist.
Then they went after the homosexuals and infirm, and I did not stand up, because I was neither.
Then they went after the Jews, and I did not stand up, because I was not a Jew.
Then they went after the Catholics, and I did not stand up, because I was a Protestant.
Finally, they went after me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.”
Even if it is for selfish reasons, we should protect one another.
There may be a time when those people who we disagree with on the most fundamental level will be the only ones there to protect us.