Letter to the University RE: the Capitol

Author’s Note: This was a letter I sent to my university after the college’s president made some statements regarding what had happened in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. I’ve gone ahead and removed/altered identifying information for privacy’s sake, though I don’t mind telling you the university is one of the four campuses that functions under the University of Colorado. I haven’t yet received a reply (I only sent it tonight, after all!), but I did receive positive feedback from some friends who read it and so I decided I would post it here, too.

United we stand.

Dear ____________,

I hesitated in sending this off. See, I'm what they call a conservative and a Trump supporter. In some places, that would get me beat up, and in D.C., apparently, it'd get me arrested.

And I have a small confession to make along those lines. Though I was nowhere near the Capitol at the time of the breaching (I had to leave D.C. by 1 P.M. local time to catch a flight home), I was present that day, among the crowd as I listened to the President speak on the 6th. What I heard and saw and felt around me was so at odds with what was later portrayed of this speech by the media. Then my mother texted me while I was in the airport, saying she was frantic for me, and explained what had gone down.

It made me feel sick to hear about it, heart and stomach. The violence was horrific, completely, and I am still shocked that such a thing must be said and can't simply be assumed as coming from a human heart...! but what also was apalling was how my people, those who weren't involved and who have also condemned the violence, were being treated after the fact.

Unfortunately, it's nothing really new to me.

For the past five years, I've lost many of my friends. I've been called racist (despite my beloved black and Filipino cousins living in Texas), misogynist (despite being female), illogical and uneducated (despite carrying a college degree and currently working on another). I've been harassed out of online communities and "cancelled".

Over the summer, I was also terrified for friends across the country due violence they received for their identities. These people aren't black, brown, transgender, liberal, or even poor, mind you. They were conservative and white.

One is a business owner in Chicago, disabled due an accident in the past, in which he tried to carry a coworker off of a collapsing bridge, only to end up falling himself onto a busy highway. Because of this accident, he only has one working lung, and so was in considerable danger of complications from smoke inhalation during the arson taking place blocks from his residence during a Black Lives Matter riot. He spent most of his days last year bunkered out in his basement, watching his business fail quite literally from afar due to the lockdowns. As it was, he had to defend his property five times, and in Chicago, where police are defunded, that means with his own gun.

Another friend is a farmer along the East Coast, whose workers demanded wages higher than her earned revenue, $1.15 per pound when her produce only brings in $1.01 per pound on a good day. When she explained to them she couldn't comply, they thanked her by lighting hay bales stacked by her house on fire. Luckily it was caught in time and no one was hurt.

Yet another lived in Philadelphia, a single mother with a child six years of age. During the race riots, her apartment was sprayed with bullets and burned down; she received several graze wounds and had to couch crash with her young son with whatever charitable friends she could find for several weeks before she could get another residence.

Finally, a fourth had a brother who over-dosed on opiods. He had been sinking into depression throughout the lockdowns, and when he learned his governor not only wouldn't allow him to visit family over the holidays, but that the new administration would likely continue the lockdowns into 2021, he took his life a few days before Christmas.

These aren't my only friends to suffer, though they're some of the most egregious.

Over the past few days, I've heard people like these described as terrorists, Nazis, white supremacists, and grandma-killers, because of their political leanings, often without bothering to hear what they really believe, why they really believe it, and certainly with no appreciation for their suffering.

Though it would be easy to fall into an all-consuming rage over this--perhaps even call for violence, as in the race riots over the summer and the assault of the Capitol on the 6th--as a conservative, my values are my guide. My values are peace, compassion, resilience, patience, practicality, hard work, tolerance, diversity, and love. Those aren't too different from a liberal's values, when it comes down to it. And I believe we are all a lot more similar than we are different--when we are not being told to hate each other because of the extremists in either party or the neverending cycle of hype on the media and online, that is. We all bleed the same color.

One of my favorite podcasts is run by a man named Dave Rubin, a gay man from California who has had his fair share of being cancelled and attacked despite his identity and his reputation of being calm, kind, and rational. During one of his podcasts, I had the honor of my question being read aloud during a live Q&A session. I was asking what the way forward was for our country.

His answer (paraphrased) was to pay more care to our local communities, to reach out and build relationships from the ground up. Though at the time I felt like this was the equivalent of digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon while a hurricane was coming in, it's through letters like yours that I began to appreciate its value and see hope after what has otherwise been a really rotten year for me and everyone around.

And so that's the reason I'm contacting you now. I'm ready to come out of the closet, so to speak, and I'm ready to talk, to listen, and I'm ready to start rebuilding our communities, with all hands on deck, efforts and wisdom from both sides of the aisle. To quote a controversial figure, conservatives and liberals need each other. This country needs us.

So what can we do? What can I do, personally, as a student of ________?

I thank you for taking your time to read this,
Amy _________