Over 60% of Americans Are Afraid to Express Their Political Beliefs
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Politics, Media, Equality, Society, Culture

I can’t help but feel disappointed by these results. As a far-left liberal, I also greatly believe that everyone should be able to express their opinions and are entitled to what they believe. The turn in 2020 has come that not all my peers on the left agree with that. Not every person believes cancel culture is real. I do. Not everyone thinks cancel culture is a bad thing, but I do. Those are just a couple of those hot-topic divisions.

I’m voting for Biden, but not the most excited about voting for Biden. I would have preferred a more exciting candidate. That’s my personal belief and how I’m going to vote. I don’t like Donald Trump, but I don’t believe in silencing Trump supporters.

The solution is not fewer conversations but more conversations. But it’s just difficult right now — given the pandemic and lockdowns around the country, it’s hard to have conversations. Online discussions have a degree of anonymity where it’s really easy to call someone names. You don’t see a face. However, in-person, it’s a lot more difficult to call people those names to their face, so perhaps the divisiveness and polarization are inevitable right now.

I’m not a highly confrontational person at all in person. Online, it’s different. It seems like everyone is angry and confrontational. But I am optimistic about the future of the country. I think politics brings out the worst in me, and I try not to feel that heated anger.

Even if we’re growing more divisive and polarized while talking online, in-person conversations are different. It’s easy to be vicious to someone we’ll never see in real life. In-person and in practice, it’s very different from theory. I have great relationships with my co-workers and always have, even though we disagree on many things, whether it’s politics or just educational theory.

Why?

We see each other every day. We rely on each other. We work together. We go through the same struggles and have to commiserate with each other when things go wrong. You don’t want to have a bad relationship with someone you see every day and work with for eight hours every day. It makes life a lot easier to like the people you work with.

And then there is life beyond politics. Sure, many things are political, but when my co-workers have mental health issues or health problems, it’s about the relationships I have with them — and we reach out to each other to make sure everything is okay.

I kept a quote on the background of my phone for a long time, from F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”

I feel like it’s controversial these days to say how much I loved this Fitzgerald quote. But it stands true more these days than ever. Because after every incident of heavy confrontation and divisive political conversation, life goes on. And life is damn hard alone, and I can’t do it just with people I agree with on the Internet’s political spectrum.

As Joseph Serwach said, “everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to change themselves.” And I want to see people build stronger relationships, so I want to be part of the world of what it means to love my neighbor. It’s more important to be kind than to be right, in this day and age more than any.

For me, what that looks like is to be of service and work hard for my students, because being of service to them and people in my life is more important than getting into an online political argument any day of the week. And being of service means we challenge each other.

I can have discussions that involve a lot of disagreement with friends, co-workers, and students. And we can have those conversations because no matter how much we disagree, we know we still love each other.