Go up to just about anyone on campus. Ask them about that person, or probably multiple people, they can’t stand. You will hear a familiar story:
Picture this: Lying in grass, basking in the spring sun, perhaps reading something chic or maybe enjoying some bowl of healthy yet succulent fare from the Malott vegetarian section, alongside an oat milk cold brew. You have embodied the apex of unproblematic Claremont Contentedness.
Suddenly, we see them: that one guy who talks too much in my sociology class, that one person who said one terrible thing to my old roommate in second semester freshman year, the girl who barfed at my birthday party whose name I never learned.
We lock eyes. “Keel over keel over keel over,” I repeat under my breath. They offer a confused wave. I crush my reusable metal coffee thermos in my shaking fist; that’s it, day ruined.
I quickly send a volley of messages: to the group chat, a snarky comment about their villainy; to my professor, notice of my need of a mental health day; to the members of the Claremont Institute hitmen, their orders. Reason cited? Irreconcilable differences.
It’s possible this isn’t exactly a good-faith representation. Sometimes people in Claremont treat other people badly — and sometimes they are truly evil — but we don’t have to treat everyone with that same suspicion. Not everyone who has behaved badly is rotten to the core.
The norms of constant discourse, political, social or otherwise, perpetuated by our increasingly online world, have allowed us to bring the combative, polarized nature of our parasocial disputes into our real lives. This, along with the zeitgeist of psychologizing language, has turned us into a community of self-righteous seethers. This environment has deprived us of most opportunities for reevaluation and productive discourse. Once a thief, always a thief.
But permanently relegating someone to your shit-list is almost always a mistake. You fight, you break up, but where’s the kiss and the make-up?
It seems like we’re increasingly delighted at the prospect of creating, mythologizing and spreading hardline demonizing narratives about people who, most of the time, are just (annoying) people. Simultaneously, in telling others our stories about the magnitude of our personal injustices, we revise and re-tell them to ourselves.
Most of the time, there is little benefit to anyone involved in holding a grudge and maintaining a stable of enemies. Some people, it’s true, are worse than we previously thought, but very few are irredeemably evil. You’re not gonna be best friends, but the sight of them shouldn’t ruin your day.
You don’t always have to take the high road. It’s not like you’re Michelle Obama. We all have a class guy that we don’t like, who talks too much and we disagree with. I’m not mandating a heart-to-heart. He might kind of suck!
However, being more active in civil discussion is precisely what we need to practice here in the comparatively low-stakes environment of school. Eventually, our absolutist ideology will have consequences.
Our current political landscape is a consequence of absolutist parties bouncing stories back and forth about who killed whom. The New York Times recently captured a portrait of the Democrats in the wake of Trump’s inauguration and subsequent governmental bloodletting and beating. Among lamentations about tariffs and egg prices, we see the same familiar, thinly veiled, self-satisfied, almost joyful superiority: We told you so.
This attitude will clearly not win us any ground politically, and it might have lost us just enough ground last election. In the political environment, we clearly understand it as bad behavior. However, it’s this same dismissive storytelling that we allow ourselves here.
Just because the stakes on campus are awkward discussion groups or removing a friend from the group chat doesn’t make it more okay to give up on people because it’s easier and feels better. Reconciliation is a hard process by definition. It feels bad to hear bad things about yourself, and if you have the option not to, especially if the consequences are minimal, it’s tempting to take it; most do.
However, it’s our present social and future political responsibility to get off our high horse and meet at a middle ground, even though we don’t like it.
Harris’ electoral results make it painfully clear that, no matter how correct we feel on the left, the majority of Americans (even many those hung out to dry by the current regime’s policies) disagree. If we actually care about making change, we have to be willing to make sacrifices and hear how those we revile feel about us, especially now that they outnumber us.
If we hold our grudges, trash our enemies and enjoy it here — like when Republicans misstep and we celebrate — we care more about politics than policy. Being right trumps being happy. In your relationships, choose to lose politics, focus on your policies, and every once in a while, do the hard thing and reach across the aisle; you might see it show up in your approval ratings.
Your enemies shouldn’t be opportunities for I-told-you-so’s. They should be chances for you to figure out if you are really as right as you think you are. In politics and in life, we need to catch more flies with honey than by gloating and virtue-signaling.
Parker DeVore PZ ’27 hails from the mean streets of Seattle, and to be honest, if he’s wrong, he doesn’t want to be right; he doesn’t want to talk if you don’t want to talk 2 him nice.
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