Election years tend to bring out both the best and worst in people.
It is very common to see friends and especially family battle over the idea of what we should do as a nation. These fights are always billed as the “fight of our lives” or “the most important election,” and as someone who has been able to remember every election since 2012, the term gets overused.
Despite my disdain for much of what politics is today, I do understand and recognize the importance within our American system. It is important that we use our right to not only vote, but to also express our opinions and beliefs in our country.
This brings us to today and on our Wilkes campus where we see these ideas being practiced. New to our campus this year is the College Democrats club, so far having events to watch political events, such as debates.
Before we continue, I would like to congratulate the club and its members for coming together and not only hosting but educating others on information that they may or may not have known. This is what we as a student body should expect from our clubs, and we should be happy that this club is doing as such, regardless of political affiliation.
Now, in saying that, the creation of this club does create a question and the potential for something else to be created as well. With the creation of the Democratic club, I ask that a Republican club should be created as well.
Before I go on and explain, I should say that I am an independent and do not have any opinions or feelings against either political party. I have issues, likes and dislikes for both parties and I try not to get biased when looking at the two.
A Republican club used to exist on this campus before, but the club was disbanded and future political clubs were not seen as something possible on this campus. The new democratic club here has shown what a political club can do here when the hope for the club is to inform and bring people together.
However, it is obvious that not everyone on this campus is a Democrat, and there are many other political affiliations that people identify with. The creation of an alternative club for others of political ideologies allows for secondary ideas on this campus and allows for the community as a whole to understand another perspective that we often, as young people, do not see.
It is important to have that second perspective in order to understand where both sides come from. Go on social media for five seconds or just under any comment section. You will see what happens when the uninformed and the uneducated share their opinion, usually spreading hate off the back of their party.
This is due to many factors, one being that the media today allows for one to only see what they want to see and not having to hear nor understand any other perspectives. The people on this campus are much smarter than just an average person in the comment section of a post, but that does not mean we still should not hear the opinions of others and understand why they feel the way they do.
That saying, if someone were to create a Republican club, it should be done and held respectfully. That is the backbone of this proposal that I am trying to portray as we do not want to have groups who hate each other because of who they are.
As someone who is very burned out and tired by the election process, this is the one thing I want to see from this process, not caring much who gets elected. Regardless of your side of the political aisle, we can all agree that we want to gain understanding about others and to gain knowledge for our world.
It’s a rude and cruel world out there, and the least we can do is make it so that we are all educated about what both sides mean and to be able to have a positive conversation.