Before I left for the UK, I and everyone else getting set to adventure around the world were required, on pain of death, to attend a study abroad orientation. We learned things like how to be safe in foreign countries (“Just don’t walk around with your nose in your phone”), how to dress for the weather (“Texas is not normal—you will need a winter jacket”), and how generally to assimilate into our new home (“Just… don’t act so touristy”).
All of our study abroad advisor’s advice was invaluable, but there was one thing that he told us that, in my experience, has proven true over and over again.
“Especially now,” our advisor said, as I crammed my mouth full of free pizza, “people are going to ask you about politics. You may be the only American person some of these people ever meet, and you need to be prepared to answer them.”
Sure enough, in the six-odd weeks I have been on British soil, every single native I have ever had a conversation with has somehow found a way to bring up the election. Some people are really clever about it—
“So how’s the weather in Texas?” a classmate asked me over coffee a couple weeks ago.
I tried and failed to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head, and defaulted with, “It’s a lot warmer than here!”
The classmate laughed. “Oh, really?” he asked. “Not a frigid wasteland yet?”
I tried to think if I had ever heard anyone use the word frigid to describe east Texas before, and while I puzzled over it, he clarified, “You know. Because of the President.”
“Oh,” I said, clueing in. “Politics.”
After the initial broaching of the subject, all the conversations generally flow the same way. What do you think of it all? Did you vote? What do you think he’ll do? What do you think he can do? And although no one says it—because nearly everyone in the UK is wary of the Trump administration—the main thought lying beneath this line of questioning is always how could you let this happen?
There is an obvious way to answer this question, and I am always tempted to let my frustration at current events get the better of me and to give the obvious answer. It would be so easy for me to shrug off my country, denounce nearly half the population who put their support behind President Trump and say, “Well, I didn’t vote for him. Ask them.” Classic Us-Them rhetorical device—easy and self-gratifying.
It is so easy to vilify people when we do not agree with them. Any six year old can tell you that the best color is blue and that anyone who thinks otherwise—green, maybe?—is just stupid. But I have spent a lot of time trying to convince the people I know that I am not a six year old, so I have to stop and think before I say anything else—Isn’t this divisive rhetoric the thing that I hate most about the Trump administration? Don’t I think that close-mindedness is the world’s most costly sin? How hypocritical would it be for me to throw every right-leaning American I know under the bus, just to take the easy way out?
So when people ask me how I or anyone else in the United States could let any of this happen, I stop. I think hard. And—because it would not feel right to do anything else—I try to understand.
There are some bad people who voted for Trump, I tell them. But everyone has a bottom line, I say. For some people, that bottom line is social equality. For others, maybe that line is abortion, or the economy, or the Supreme Court, or something else that, for those people, allows no compromise. Or maybe some people are unhappy with the way things are, I say. Maybe they really think that this new President can change things for the better.
I disagree, but if everyone agreed with me, we would burn every disgusting tomato crop to the ground, and then what would we dip our fries in?
I do not know what the future will bring, and I cannot know if anything I say about politics or America or anything else actually sways the people here who ask me about those things. What I do know, though, is that defending these people that I disagree with—trying to understand them—is a good thing. I know that America needs my understanding more than it needs my anger, and—above anything else—I know that we are stronger together than we are divided.
Chelsea Teague is a junior majoring in professional writing and rhetoric.
This is a great piece (peace). Good job!
I love your ideas. I am glad that people are thinking about what they truly believe. I see many who maybe did not exercise their right to vote or even express their political views now becoming active in expressing them. Freedom of the press allows us to do so. It is one of the many freedoms we have in the good ole USA!