Violent crime should unify, not divide

October 14, 2009
By John Tienken
Columnist

If you have been following the reports, you know that a hate crime occurred at UIS in the early morning of Saturday, Oct. 3. Everyone on campus who has heard about this has, in some way, had to come to terms with this alleged crime committed in our backyard. 

Each person’s take on it is different. We are all unique and bring to the community different experiences and perspectives. Dealing with hate is not like a math problem bound by logic, rather, hate spawns emotion.

As we all continue to have an internal dialogue with ourselves and dialogues with one another, we should be aware of how this act on campus relates in a larger sense. What happened here is not an anomaly. The crime did not occur isolated in the bubble that surrounds UIS, but within a complex society that we interact with constantly. What do we make of this?

We need to remember and understand that we are all people.  Differences make us who we are, yet often society finds a way to define us by a single aspect and a single characteristic that can be penciled in on an admissions application. 

We all took ACTs to come to UIS; many will take GREs to leave here. We all had to fill out a bubble to tell them who we were. We, as a campus and a nation, should come to terms with the fact that those qualities, those bubbles on standardized tests, are not the sum of who we are. They are dynamic parts that shape our identities. Hate crimes everywhere perpetrate the grave mistake of labeling, separating and hurting because of that identifier in a bubble.

Bubble differentiation too often reminds us of how we are different. In an attempt for political correctness, sensitivity and acknowledgement do we lose the original aims intended by those behaviors?

The origins of political correctness lie in a basic understanding that we as individuals merit respect. But in our earnestness for respect and being respectful when dealing with those who differ from us, we constantly remind ourselves of what makes us different from them, what term we should use to further signify how different they are, rather than concentrating on the characteristics that we share and that could bring us together.  

We, on campus, must remember that what brings us together in this society is a common humanity. This common humanity is based on an agreement amongst each other as individuals in our society. Together at the most basic level we share, deserve and agree to uphold for one another inalienable rights. These innate rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Hate crime destroys this agreement.

Today let’s focus on what unites us, rather than what is there to divide us. It is time we recognize we have an understood agreement to one another.

If we can begin to have the understanding that we are all unique, but that we share more than we can know, perhaps we as a campus and the nation can begin to move away from what separates us. Then we can further our climb to the lofty heights of our common ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for each and everyone.