As I prepare to cast my vote for President Bush on November 2, I cannot help but think back to the last presidential election. I admit it?had I been old enough to vote during my senior year of high school, I would have proudly cast my vote for Ralph Nader.
However, I, the budding communist revolutionary, was pegged as a "Republican" by some of my leftist colleagues soon after arriving on campus. Why? I believe that war, unfortunately, is sometimes necessary. No war could ever solve anything, they said?forgetting about the independence of our country, the abolition of slavery, and the Nazis, to name a few.
When news broke out that I wanted to have a big family, I was lectured multiple times for being anti-feminist and anti-woman, which I found personally insulting because I thought I was a pretty good guy. The implication was that marrying me meant marrying into a life of oppression. I had never thought of families as prisons before, but I still tried to be open-minded.
To be fair, these condemnations were not made by normal Democrats, but extreme leftists? the same radical leftists that I believed in, the ones who had preached open-mindedness and tolerance had me pegged as a Republican warmonger. They were extremely open-minded... except towards "conservative" ideas, and believe me; it does not take much to be labeled a conservative here!
Luckily, my alienation from campus liberals caused me to question the things that Nader and Michael Moore had "taught" me. With a little research I realized that almost none of their ideas had any practical value. For years, I had been thinking that America was one big worst-case scenario instead of a land of opportunity. I hate to admit it now, but I had been duped by finger-pointing ideologues.
Unfortunately, I believe that people with the same leftist views still run the Democratic side of the political campus today, and, true to form, they seem to be blind to criticism if it comes from a College Republican.
My path toward the right of the political spectrum here at Bowdoin was by no means an anomaly. Bowdoin, it appears to me, has the amazing ability to be very liberal on the surface but run an underground assembly line of conservatives?former liberals fed up with the left.
Unfortunately for honest and open debate, the radical left on campus has a stranglehold on many of the liberal political groups on campus. For example, the College Democrats are closely aligned with the Democratic Socialists. Where are the moderate Democrats supposed to go? Their voices are drowned out by attention-starved leftists with a "Bush is Evil" message.
While I believe that extremists ranting and raving will convert more people to the Republican Party like it did with me, it is for the greater good for those with extreme views (I can admit that I am in this category) to allow others to speak up. Hopefully, this year we will be able to get away from the pattern of both extremes bashing heads and we will stop and listen to the 98 percent of campus that lies somewhere in the middle.