OPINION: Take it from a high school student — Trump campaign hitting low point

By Lisa Shen
GSS Correspondent

WALNUT, Calif. — Take it from a 17-year-old: American politics has regressed into the kind of bare-knuckle campaigning and self-inflicted wounds that wouldn’t be tolerated at my high school, much less a race for high office.

I spent this weekend watching Trump as he made his way through an increasingly familiar laundry list of bigoted words and racial slurs, which not surprisingly led to chaos at his rallies in Chicago, Dayton, Ohio, and Kansas City, Missouri.

The laundry last began last June, when Trump entered the race:

Since then, there have been similar attacks on women, blacks, the media and even “the Japs.” As an Asian American and a student journalist, those words have had an impact on me both personally and professionally.

Trump has consistently called for violence against protesters at his rallies and his followers continue to admire his bombastic personality. Sadly, it’s a twist on President Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” — Trump’s audacity is his ability to say anything he likes, apparently without fear of consequence.

I’m a student journalist who has loved language and worked with words for as long as I can remember. So I think it’s important to say that the content of candidate Trump’s words are no longer an issue of political correctness (he has gone way past that) and rather a case of intentional provocation and unwarranted personal attacks. The growing chaos in advance of Super Tuesday’s primaries is a natural reflection of his own inclinations towards violence and ad hominem attacks.

But students across the country are beginning to push back.

Muslim, Latino and African American students organized petitions and a Facebook page to cancel last Friday’s rally at the University of Illinois-Chicago:

Protesters opposed Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, which ran against the campus’s struggle for inclusion.

With a history of calling Mexicans “rapists”, remarks like “laziness is a trait of blacks” and calls for “the total and complete shutdown” of Muslim travel to the U.S., it’s no wonder that Trump wasn’t welcomed on a campus that includes the Muslim Student Association, the Fearless Undocumented Association and a controversy this year over an “Illini White Students Union” that called the Black Lives Matter movement “terrorism.”

The Facebook page shows that UIC students had good reason to protest the rally — they were scared.

“As an undocumented UIC graduate student, I feel unsafe knowing that Trump along with his followers will be at my university,” coordinator Jorge Mena wrote in a letter to the campus administration. “We already face systemic violence but we’re increasingly becoming targets of attack by his followers on and off Trump’s campaign trail.”

However, the protesters also exhibited callous behavior with protest signs that portrayed Trump as Hitler. Ironically, despite their good intentions, activists escalated the rage and hatred they sought to oppose.

As clichéd as it sounds, those of us who are opposed to  Trump must resemble the change we hope to see. Provocations will no doubt continue, as seen in a Kansas City rally on Saturday when Trump accused a protester of being “ISIS-related” and threatened protesters in St. Louis with arrests and charges.

USSS did an excellent job stopping the maniac running to the stage. He has ties to ISIS. Should be in jail! https://t.co/tkzbHg7wyD?ssr=true

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2016

As millennials we have a civic and civil obligation to improve our democracy by counteracting prejudice with facts and composure, not blows and vindictiveness. Social media-savvy activists at U of I used their Facebook page to invite 50,000 to the Trump rally in Chicago. But invites alone aren’t the only way; we have to exercise judgment by not “liking” or “tweeting” the first campaign ad that appears in our newsfeed. In the end, better educated voters are what will produce a stronger democracy.

Let others attempt to fight and bare-knuckle their way to the top. But those of us who will be running the country one day should use our heads.

—Featured photo: Photo by nathanmac87 via Wikimedia Commons. 

Lisa Shen is opinions editor of The Hoofprint, the award-winning student news website of Walnut High School in Walnut, California. She is also founder and editor-in-chief of Inksight, an online political journal. Contact Shen at lisashen.whs@gmail.com.