“Bolsonaro is better for the future of Brazil than Lula,” said one of my close friends, whose parents are first-generation Brazilian immigrants, with firm belief and conviction like he hadn’t just dropped the jaw of his roommate sitting across from us.
His roommate, a son of first-generation Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and I, the relative of multiple openly-gay family members, raised a finger before he could even finish the sentence.
Of course, we did.
Jair Bolsonaro, who lost re-election last month to former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, became notorious across the world for a series of antisemetic and homophobic assertions in his four-year term as Brazilian president.
Our friend acknowledged both of those positions as appalling — as he assured us most Brazilians do — but remained fixed on his stance. In Brazil, as he would bluntly explain, homophobia and anti-semetism are not as significant as economic inequality and widespread poverty, two issues that many Brazilians believe Bolsonaro would sufficiently solve.
In America — especially in the northeast and at Boston University — the open presence of either homophobia or antisemitism is an immediate deal-breaker. Game over, and reasonably so.
The immediate instinct is to point fingers and cry of moral wrongdoing. How can anyone possibly move past open anti-Jewish and anti-LGBT discrimination?
Well, this is what your first year at college will teach you, who are we to point the finger at all?
It’s easy to forget that college and the world beyond it will eventually launch us into an endlessly diverse place. Diversity brings forward the unknown — a myriad of different experiences and billions of pairs of shoes that you will never be able to try on.
None of it is going to make any sense.
I wanted to respond to my friend’s modest support for Bolsonaro with convicted indignation, to throw all of the baggage I had gathered over 18 years and carried into my first-year at college in his face. I wanted to match his perspective with mine because his didn’t make sense, so mine had to be right.
But mine isn’t right. Perspectives are endlessly personalized and unfathomably specific — they aren’t right or wrong. They’re different.
My first semester in college has been a stark reminder — if not, a confirmation — of the significance of diverse points of view. It threw me right into the deep end, forcing me to confront the most seemingly extreme of opposing perspectives.
And it’s so important that I didn’t. The benefits go beyond avoiding the obvious problems that arise from butting heads with every inevitable differing perspective in the maze of an incomprehensibly diverse world.
It’s more than just knowing to bite my tongue.
Biting my tongue allows me to open my ears, and to listen to all of the experiences that have shaped an opposing point of view. Understanding what makes someone else’s place in the world helps us to truly realize our own.
It allows you to know what to be grateful for, to uncover many of your privileges you didn’t even know were there — like being raised with enough economic stability to have the opportunity to fight for LGBTQ+ rights. It allows you to appreciate those privileges and to further acknowledge the importance of making good use of them. It allows you to know what to aim for in the future, or what to demand yourself from those above you.
That list goes on and on, all valuable epiphanies that I will need to come across, most still yet to be discovered.
There’s so much beauty in that — it’s scary, bewildering and certainly overwhelming — but it’s empowering in the opportunity it provides. Above all, it’s satisfying — if not relieving — in the meaning that it adds to the next four trying and expensive years.
When you look at it like that, keeping a closed mind and clinging to the comfort of your own perspective is as much a disservice as it is a wasted opportunity.
So next time you want to raise your hand and point your finger, put your hand down and bite your tongue.
Just listen — there is so much to learn. And college is certainly the place for that.
