Mike Pence, Indiana and Me

Talk of the Quad: Liberal Arts: not so liberal

I come from a bubble of liberalism. As a New Yorker who attended the same small private school for all 14 years of her education prior to Bowdoin, I had only been exposed to a very progressive, very liberal perspective. I had more openly gay friends than I did straight friends, until recently had never encountered an individual who was pro-life and had only been taught by Democratic teachers. There were four conservative students at my high school and not one them openly shared their opinions with the student body. School-wide assemblies were aimed to figure out how to better participate in the women’s rights movement and class discussions were focused around the intersectionality of identity. My home life was even more one-sided. Since the first Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2008, my mother has donned pink jeans, pink Converse, pink sunglasses and a pink T-shirt with an authoritative portrait of Secretary Clinton on a weekly basis. I was vacuum-packed within my bubble.
Although Bowdoin is a predominantly liberal campus, I come from a community that makes Bowdoin seem conservative in comparison. Bowdoin is my first exposure to living in a community with people who possess fundamentally different views than my own. Difference in political atmosphere is the largest adjustment I have had to make in my transition to college. Despite the fact that it has been engrained into my mind to listen to views that differ from my own, as that is central to progress, I have never had to put that into practice until now.
On the first night of my pre-Orientation trip, outside a cabin along the Appalachian Trail, my group launched itself into a deep conversation about racial inequality. The debate was centered around the validity of the Black Lives Matter movement and affirmative action. Perched in a hammock by the light of a campfire, I was stunned that people could find fault in the efforts of the movement. Although I did speak up, I found myself struggling to form a coherent argument to counter the one with which I so fundamentally disagreed. I had never had to defend my beliefs before. My beliefs had always been the shared by the people around me. There had never been a cause for argument. Upon returning to campus, as the election progressed, I found myself face-to-face with views that women should not participate in combat roles, that there is an age that qualifies as too young to get gender reassignment surgery and, most shocking of all, that Trump should be elected president.
While I was never ignorant of that fact that somewhere in the world there were people whose ways of thinking deviated from that of my community back home, it was never a world in which I lived. Bowdoin’s different environment has caused me to question the roots of my beliefs. Most importantly, while it was obvious before, it is even more obvious now that based on the recent election results, a liberal perspective (my liberal perspective) is not the correct perspective. It is just one perspective among a diverse array of political thought, both on this campus and in the country.
Sara Caplan is a member of the class of 2020.

Talk of the Quad: The broken container

Last year, I was in Paris during the terrorist attacks, and I don’t know how to tell that story. Similarly, I don’t know how to tell the story about Trump’s recent election. But there seems to be a strange and shivering thread between the two events. Both violent, painful, chaotic. Yet Paris was somewhat contained. This election is not—the common mantra being, “We just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
We tell stories to make meaning of trauma—to contain pain so we can better examine it and give it value. But sometimes we are in such distress that the container cracks. We can no longer write or speak in the same way, we can no longer contain the pain or carry it comfortably.
Paris: the cherry glow of sirens, the bitter cold, windows slamming shut, a vacant Eiffel Tower. Alternatively: my friend who calmly held my hand, the family member who made a quiche, a café filled with people drinking champagne the next day.
Either it becomes a story of horror and fear, which you’ve already heard, or a story of healing and bravery, which feels mawkish and insincere.
I think we dislike narratives which exist in gray, uncertain space. We want them to have logic, to land on one side of a binary—tragedy or comedy, conflict resolved or broken open, a character whose biggest desire is fulfilled or wrenched from them completely. Climax, falling action, resolution.
But trauma, especially when it first occurs, isn’t a neat and tidy narrative. Sometimes there is no narrative at all.
The New Yorker recently featured a piece in which 16 writers weighed in on the election. As my friend Marie Scarles observed, “There are so many different versions of why Trump won, and so many ways for us to imagine the future. Should we pay more attention to poor whites? To Muslims? To women? To LGBTQ? To racists? To immigrants? All seem urgent, but none can be held as the be-all-end-all.”
We are searching for a straightforward answer, an immediate ending so this can be over and done with.
After the election, hunched over my carrel in H-L and unable to write, I got a text message from my father: “Trauma turns us into animals, which means story-telling turns off. We revert to fight, flight or shock.” But sometimes, maybe our storytelling tendencies shutting down is a good thing. Maybe it allows us to survive. Narratives can be healing, but they can also be dangerous.
By attending to many different perspectives, perhaps a new story will eventually arise, something both nuanced and messy, something which contains many strands. Perhaps it will be a story of hope but a particular kind of hope, which Rebecca Solnit describes as “an ax you break down doors with in an emergency … [it] should shove you out the door.”
For now, we are living in uncertainty. The story is that there is no story—at least no singular one—which means there is no singular conflict, no one resolution. I wish I had a coherent story to tell about Paris, but I don’t. For me, the container is still broken open, as it is now for America post-election. This means we must listen to each other, and listen carefully.
Raisa Tolchinsky is a member of the Class of 2017.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Nickie Mitch

Orient Staff

November 18, 2016

Like many people on this campus, I was filled with shock and dismay as the results of last Tuesday’s election became clear. However, I was already keenly aware of the non-urban, rust belt, working class whites who delivered the Trump-Pence victory. They are my neighbors, former classmates and teachers and, yes, even my friends. I am from the heart of Trump country. In fact, I am from Mike Pence’s hometown: Columbus, Indiana.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mike Pence and I are similar people. We grew up a few miles from each other. We both attended and graduated from Columbus North High School. And here’s my favorite: we were both president of Bartholomew County Young Democrats. Of course, that misses profound differences. He’s Donald Trump’s Vice President. He crushed teachers’ unions, fought for legalized discrimination against LGBTQ people and signed a regressive anti-choice bill that mandated fetal funerals. I am an environmental studies major with fond memories of driving with my mom around the block over and over again to yell at anti-choice protesters that “Planned Parenthood saves lives.”

Mike Pence and I hold very different values but are both somehow representatives of our shared town and state. Anyone who knows me well is probably aware that I have a complicated relationship with my hometown and it continues to shape me, the person I am and the person I will be. At the same time, I think if you asked my close friends, they wouldn’t hesitate to tell you I really dislike it. They aren’t really wrong. The sight of sunsets over rolling fields will always hold a special place in my heart, but to me, my hometown represents 18 years of feeling out of place.

Though I lived my entire pre-college life in Columbus, most of my neighbors and classmates there would not call me a local. Being a Hoosier is about heritage and values, not birth. In all fairness, I didn’t really consider myself a local either and, when I headed to Bowdoin, I naively assumed that my hometown and home state would be an unimportant part of my identity. I was eager to drive 22 hours to Maine and forget about it all as I moved on to better and brighter days. I was going to my people—the ones I had been waiting 18 years to meet.

At Bowdoin, I have found my best friends in the world but Indiana remains a peculiar part of me. I didn’t know that I had an accent before I came to Bowdoin. I didn’t know that my floormates would think my being from Indiana explained my music tastes. I didn’t think about the fact that I had never skied or sailed. I didn’t realize I would feel compelled to speak up—in class and elsewhere—for the same rural Americans I was bullied by at home.

After this election, I must consider and explain my hometown in a new context. While my peers from the coasts and cities may speak abstractly about the non-urban whites in the rust belt, this suddenly relevant part of our country is something very concrete to me. It is my best friend from second grade who was not allowed to spend time with me after his mom found out I was the ring bearer in a lesbian wedding. But it is also my neighbors who rushed to bring me balloons and a card when they found out I had pneumonia. It is all the kids in elementary and middle school who shunned me when they found out I wasn’t baptized and made certain I was aware I was going to hell. But it is also my high school teacher who still sends me care packages and takes me out to lunch when I go home. While kids in high school hated me for my Democratic political activism, my best friends traveled over 1,000 miles just to visit me for three days during our first year at college. To me, my town is a complex, weird, lived experience. But to others it is the rust belt, the corn belt, tornado alley and now, Trump/Pence country. As many of my peers struggle to understand a part of this nation they have never seen and don’t want to, I feel obligated once again to own and represent a place that is part of me but isn’t really mine.

Nickie Mitch is a member of the class of 2018.

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