In my last BG News column, I discussed just how important it is for young people to do the hard work of actively improving their community – including Bowling Green, which is BGSU students’ second home. I noted that progress we make on civil rights – from supporting LGBTQIA+ citizens to affirming that black lives matter – is not set in stone once achieved, but must continually be defended against further regression.
As if to prove my point, a resident wrote a letter to the editor of the Sentinel-Tribune, Wood County’s local newspaper, accusing LGBTQIA+ folks and their allies of engaging in “moral depravity” and denying that the pernicious evil of racism is actually a substantive problem facing our nation.
I believe our community is at its best when it welcomes and affirms everyone – not merely tolerates some and certainly not when it disparages some. Our community is at its best when it does this not just in spite of a person’s identity and/or background, but actually because of their identity and/or background. Our community should embrace, adopt and continually build a culture of affirmation, and nothing less will do if we are to live up to our highest ideals.
I know there are folks out there who do not share my perspective, including some folks who think and act differently – or at least believe they do – out of love. But meaning well is not enough. We can have good intentions but still hurt others.
Why hurt, when you can help? We should be a community in which people and communities of color are actively engaged by the rest of us, our cultural differences celebrated, not merely tolerated; a community in which, rather than having events lumping “groups” of people together with different life experiences in the name of diversity, we recognize, support and affirm the independent value of those different experiences. I see a community in which we lift each other up, empower each other to feel they can simply be who they are, let alone experience the kind of peace only those who do not experience attacks on their identity experience – the kind of peace that makes life worth living.
Because in the final analysis, some of our lives are different and carry different consequences. Prejudice against marginalized communities serves to dehumanize folks and subject them to a harsher life than they should have to have – and life is already filled with so much suffering. For some of us these problems may seem remote, abstract, divorced from our everyday experiences. But just because they may appear in the national news does not mean they are not happening closer to home. Indeed, we have had overt acts of hate. The amount of suffering people endure because of their identity – whether they are folks of color, or identify as LGBTQIA+, or are low-income or do not worship the same deity as others – is unconscionable, and it is up to us to ensure that not one person in all of Bowling Green has to go through that.
So ask yourself: am I doing enough to build a more compassionate city and campus? If you feel you have no time to yourself these days, that is okay – self-care is an important part of being an activist or leader. But if you have some time to spare, think of what you could do to create the future, instead of lamenting the present or hoping things will get better on their own.
You can push a student organization to get more active in the causes it values, or create one if you think there is a cause getting neglected. You can vote in local elections to support officials who actively fight for marginalized folks, or advocate on their behalf. You can join BG’s chapter of Not In Our Town, the national movement working hard to stamp out hate and prejudice across the nation. If you do not know who to approach about getting more involved, and research is not turning up much, ask a professor or mentor or a friend you think may already be involved.
Most students will leave Bowling Green after finishing undergraduate studies. But this is our home, too, and we have a chance to leave it a better place than it was when we first found it. Let’s make it happen.
