Hope is a Beautiful Thing

or, how this teen found hope during the 2020 primary in a small-town mayor.

After an eighth-grade debate class in November of 2016, my teacher called me in. This teacher and I weren’t particularly fond of one another; having done competitive debate prior to this class, I was often exasperated by her oversimplification of complex issues. I get it — we were twelve and thirteen-year-olds — but we weren’t idiots. So when she called me in that day, I didn’t know where she was going. It was clear what she wanted to say after a few minutes of sidestepping: she was concerned about my increasingly political statements during election month. “I understand you strongly believe what you believe, but you don’t have to impose that on other people,” I vaguely recall her saying. I paused for a second, dumbfounded. What exactly did I say that was seen as an ‘imposition of belief’? Was it that, when asked which candidate I preferred, I responded quickly, “Hillary, because I think she respects people more than Trump”?

I wasn’t one to talk back to teachers. I wasn’t one to stand up for myself, despite my unabashed willingness to stand up for the political causes I believe in. So I said sorry, “It won’t happen again,” and left.

Two weeks later, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. I didn’t really follow politics up until the 2016 election for two reasons: One, because the election prior happened in the midst of my fourth-grade year, so I didn’t really have the words to articulate complex political opinions at the age of nine. And two, I didn’t really have a reason to care. I know that sounds awful, but as an American living abroad, I wasn’t seeing the day to day implications of the political decisions made.

At the age of thirteen, I was already alarmed by much of Trump’s rhetoric. I began to understand that you don’t have to be living in a country to have the decisions made in it impact you and those you love. I thought of my brother, an Asian-American like myself, and how he was starting his first year of college. Would he be treated differently under an administration that saw anyone who wasn’t white as other? I thought of my uncle and his boyfriend. Would his right to marry, won just the year before, be taken away? I began to realize just how…

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