What an intense week. I’m dizzy.
Keeping your finger on the pulse is our newspaper’s basic premise. At the Free Press, we spend our mornings, days, and nights like bedside nurses taking vital signs every half hour. Between a fatal accident involving the cross country team, a Gubernatorial debate that ended in one candidate being escorted out by police, and a protest march directed against USM administration, the heart of this campus felt more like cardiac arrest than a steady beat.
But something else happened this week that made me sick. A student on the Gorham campus was allegedly victimized by a group of his peers. He sat in Books Dining Hall eating a meal with some friends when students at a nearby table made homophobic comments, and threatened him with a gun, before chasing him out of the dining hall.
At USM? This really happened? I thought that I belonged to a campus that prided itself on issues of acceptance, tolerance and diversity. I thought that our school valued having the perspective of a LGBT community and the benefits that having a heterogenous population can provide. I thought I remembered “No on 1” rallies and open forums put on by LGBTQ studies. I remember sitting at the forum, listening to a student who identified as transgendered speak and thinking about how nice it was that the room was full of interested students who wanted to hear his perspective. USM felt like a bubble of acceptance and freedom to live however we want to and still be respected as an essential ingredient to the mix of people that is our student body.
And then Tuesday, a student was threatened with a gun and chased out of his own campus dining hall by some group of students who felt it necessary to terrorize one of their own. Imagine how that student felt as he caught his breath after running scared from peers, neighbors of his who wanted to hurt him because of who they perceived him to be. Imagine being on the Gorham campus and running for your life.
What happened here?
Is this a wake-up call? Is USM’s code to “reject acts of discrimination based on sexual orientation” (among other things) just an ideal that we can’t live up to?
Maybe this is one isolated incident that shouldn’t illicit red flags. But maybe we should look at the type of school, the type of students, the type of people that we want to be.
Maybe we’re not as evolved as we thought we were. Are you okay with that? I know I’m not.