Democratic liberals: tainting their goal?

by Samantha Polon

Wednesday February 22, 2006

Today’s young liberals exist in a world of either apathy or fantasy.

Too many students hide behind the label "liberal," remaining uninformed and choosing instead to stay nothing at all. When presented with a social issue, these "liberals" subscribe to the party line without actually forming their own opinion.

Many liberal groups live in a world of fantasy, attacking conservative viewpoints while providing no viable solutions. Using protest as their most powerful tool, these groups believe that challenging everything is the only way to create change.
Because the majority of Sarah Lawrence students are liberals, political discussion is one sided at best. The college itself is divided only among liberals: the Left and the far Left.

Some on-campus clubs work hard to raise awareness while others remain in relative obscurity. A visable force on campus is "World Can’t Wait," which calls for students to protest the current administration, hoping to remove George W. Bush from office before 2008. Groups like the SLC Democrats appear to exist only to say that they are liberal, and to mimic what the larger party has already stated.

Young liberals are behaving much like the Democratic Party itself, from which criticisms are being freely thrown at the Bush administration without any viable solutions being offered.
It has been said that the Left doesn’t know how to fix the problem and that the Right doesn’t know what the problem is. Bi-partisanship means that both sides approach the problem with the information and reasoning the other does not have. To make progress we must accept that conservatism is a force to be worked with, not against. We must accept the things we cannot change and work with them.

Rallying and challenging world leaders will not change society on the scale that it did in the 1970s because of crucial differences in the situation. Our parents were protesting against a war that was faraway and only threatened those fighting there. September 11th brought danger to our shores and fear to the voters. The chance of removing a president in these circumstances is pretty remote, if not impossible under the state of anarchy, suggested by "World Can’t Wait" as being necessary to forcibly remove a president from office.

We have to move past demonizing an entire administration, especially with the current state of our government. We must work on educating ourselves and putting ourselves into positions of power from which we can effect change from within the structure we seek to change.

Students at Sarah Lawrence seem to adopt the mentality "it’s us or them" when addressing political problems. Sitting in the Red Room watching the State of the Union address, I was again reminded of just how liberal our school is.

While it was reassuring to be sitting in a room of like-minded individuals who would chuckle at the same fumbles, point out the fiscal strain of the war in Iraq and shake their heads at the President’s obvious disdain for gay marriage and homosexuality in general, I was troubled by the lack of discussion.

Without anyone to challenge your views, you don’t have to stand up for your beliefs and can instead freely criticize those who cannot defend theirs. In my experience, this is the biggest problem with the liberal youth of today: they have very little to say that is not negative.

We are fortunate enough to be receiving an education that can give us the tools to figure out how to approach our problems in a positive light and how to build solutions.

We need to learn how to approach situations diplomatically and rationally instead of saying that our opinion is the only right opinion. To be a good liberal you have to learn how to talk to conservatives.