A Whitworth conservative's lament

Whitworth, where conservatives are assumed to be stupid and mean.

For four years at Whitworth I have remained apolitical for the sake of peacekeeping, my own sanity and conflict avoidance. I’ve sat amongst friends while they called members of my own ideology retarded, racist, Nazi, uneducated, uninformed, morally inferior, anti-feminist, elitist and many other less than pleasant names.

Since I am from Alaska, almost everyone I know pestered me about Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens during last year's elections. They would ask me where I'm from in Alaska, in the hopes that my answer would be Wasilla and that I would join them in the glee of bashing her. They would start a long-winded speech about how Palin loves shooting wolves from airplanes for sport, how she's ignorant because people claimed she said she could see Russia from her house and how Stevens is an ancient, corrupt politician who deserves to be hung out to dry.

After a while I just stopped responding to their questions. I stopped answering, not because I didn't have answers to their claims, but because they wouldn't ask me about Palin or Stevens for my insight or opinion. They asked me simply as a precursor to judging and bashing these people and issues.

The intolerance for any viewpoint other than their own was so impassioned that it was hard at times to be cordial while spending time with them. They were my friends, though, my closest friends. They spent hours loathing the intolerance of some fundamentalists, never stopping to think that being intolerant of those who are intolerant is still intolerance.

I am conservative. I am educated, I am not racist, I am not anti-feminist, nor am I any of the other things they claim that members of my ideology, and thus myself, are. The characterization of conservatives as mindless drones does nothing for this country except keep genuine debate from occurring between opposing views.

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In all my years at Whitworth, the most closed-minded and intolerant people I’ve met were those claiming to be the exact opposite. They did not think introspectively about ideas different than their own, they discarded them as loony and stupid, not even worthy to be entertained by their far superior mindsets. It was an elitism the likes of which I have never experienced in any other group of people.