Henry Abbott

Eighty years from now, my hometown will be swallowed by the ocean. Hot, white sand and elegant, drooping oak trees decimated by the incoming tide. My three-bedroom, FEMA-manufactured home, which has lasted decades longer than it was meant to, will not withstand the devastation. Most of you reading this have never heard of my hometown and, after reading this, will never think twice about it. Most of you have never and will never step foot in the land I come from—a land of blue and red confederate flags swaying in the thick damp air, of heavy, mumbled accents and gas for two dollars a gallon.

I lived in that land for the first eighteen years of my life: the American South. I am from Pass Christian (pass kris-CHAN), a small town in Mississippi on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. I never went further than Gatlinburg, Tennessee until I was seventeen and toured Bowdoin for the first time, having already been accepted through Questbridge.

I was raised by Republicans, listened to conservative talking points at every holiday dinner, heard the phrase “Don’t take Jesus’s name in vain” in my public school classrooms. I was ostracized by my peers at twelve years old because I cut my long hair into a pixie cut and told everyone that I was a lesbian. I was told, standing right outside the door of my seventh-grade computer class, “I hope you know you’re going to Hell,” by the same boy who asked me to the homecoming dance, because he thought our political disagreements were moments of playful flirtation. I spent four years of high school hiding my queerness, trying and failing to be accepted by my peers and escape the label of the weird gay kid. When Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I sobbed in the bathroom alone after an argument with my parents about gay marriage. All of this to say, I absolutely did not grow up conditioned by my surroundings to become a leftist.

Still, I expected more out of our nation, and I underestimated the level of bigotry that exists nationwide. I hoped, like most of us here did, that good would triumph over evil. Yes, evil.

Because it is evil when people die because they cannot receive the medical care they would have five years ago. It is evil when Black students all over the South, including many of my friends from home, receive text messages calling them slurs and asking them to pick cotton in the name of Donald Trump. It is evil when willful misinformation is spread across millions of uneducated people, preying on their poverty and fear, and when public education continues to be attacked. I concede that the Democratic Party needed a wake-up call. I, like most of my peers, am not afraid to be critical of the Democratic Party. There was much more that needed to be done, and there were many ways in which we were failed.

It is easy to say that elections do not actually change much, that life just goes on like normal, that we just have to get through these next four years when you sit in such a high position of power that politics do not directly impact you. But already women’s reproductive rights have been torn away from us as a direct result of Trump’s presidency. Should he appoint more conservative Supreme Court judges in the coming years, any non-white, non-straight, non-cis person living in America is going to be more at risk than they were before for decades to come. Education, healthcare, climate action, gender-affirming care, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights and especially the lives of immigrants are all at risk.

As Bowdoin students, we are supposed to be committed to the common good. I cannot see how there is any world where supporting the current presidential administration is demonstrating such a commitment. Rather, you are demonstrating support for the sexist, homophobic and white supremacist values that America was built upon and that it will continue to exhibit should we journey further down this backwards path.