On Monday, the front page of the IDS spread had three articles. Two were about rape. One was about racism, a hate crime. This time, I took it personally. I think it is time to say no more, but not in the way one would think.
When awful things happen, we react by getting upset, up in arms or angry, but then we move on because we have to. I go to school, I work, I live my life and try to be the happiest that I can be, but that doesn’t leave that much time for anything else. There are jobs, lives and schoolwork to be done, and, ultimately, we are desensitized, perhaps thinking there is nothing we could do, or honestly, that it is just not our problem.
Last weekend, MacArthur Genius Ai-Jen Poo was invited to campus to keynote at the Themester symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Immigration Act and what she said resonated with me. Her message was to choose life and love over racism and hate. Think about that for a second, making the conscious choice of life and love.
The reality of living on this campus is that rapes happen. We saw this in the Sexual Assault Climate Survey published Tuesday by President McRobbie. In that survey, 17 percent of our fellow undergrad women and 2 percent of undergraduate men responded, saying they had experienced nonconsensual attempted or completed sexual penetration.
Moving forward, I argue that the critical distinction is that we avoid characterizing violence as simply an individual act or isolated event, but instead something we have to respond to holistically as a university, individual and community to create a net positive from something very negative.
If every time we respond to violent events with — not outrage — life and love it makes our community safer and stronger. Imagine it as almost gently nudging IU towards the right path, making the world just a little bit better, one person at a time, one step at a time. Hopefully everyone has time for that in their lives. Stand up and choose: life and love.
Eric Langowski
IU student
