Don’t debate them, just ignore them

I attend college in the pacific north west. It is a fairly liberal area, a place where people introduce themselves with their pronouns, where I’ve seen more boys with nail polish on than girls, and where weed is legal. None of these things are bad, they’re just things that differentiate where I live now to where I grew up.

I was raised in Kansas, a red state where even the moderate republicans spew uninformed rhetoric. There are, of course, liberal bubbles in Kansas, and I love the town of Wichita where I grew up and it will always be my home. But being raised liberal in a red state makes you different from liberals raised in a blue state.

I first noticed this my second week of college in the fall. There had been a bible thumper in the center square of our campus spewing out hate about how gays are going to hell and unless we repent, we will as well.

I was raised Episcopalian, and know the bible. My faith or sometimes lack thereof isn’t going to be swayed by some loudmouthed bigot. I just rolled my eyes and continued on to my classes.

At one of my classes later in the day, a course consisting of around 17 students, one of the boys came in talking about how he was trying to debate the guy. He had argued him, and it had essentially turned into a screaming match. I asked why he had interacted. He wasn’t going to change the speaker’s mind, and the speaker wasn’t going to change his. Why even bother getting involved. He said it’s because the man was convincing people of his rhetoric.

But here’s the thing, you don’t become a bigot over night. No one makes a complete 180 from being on the left side of liberal to becoming a conservative bigot because of what some greasy man in khakis in your college’s square was saying. If these students were agreeing with this man, it’s because those were ideas they already held.

I then realized that some of the kids I now go to school with have never been outnumbered in ideology. They’ve never been told that their inclusive liberal ideals were wrong, and everyone else in the room thought they were wrong to.

They were never given detention for participating in a walkout in protest of gun violence and the massacre of school kids. Their schools had helped arranged walk outs. They never had principals say they didn’t want a “safe space” sign on their office door when the GSA was putting them up because he didn’t want the students that were against gay rights to feel excluded. They never had feminism clubs banned for being controversial. They never had doctors deny them birth control for fear it would make them promiscuous.

These are all things I experienced in high school. And although each event made me mad, and made me rebel, for most of them, despite my best efforts and the efforts of my peers, we couldn’t change the outcome.

I learned early on that you can’t change everyone’s mind. And that sometimes not engaging is the best way to engage. I had seen people on street corners with signs about what actions would send us to hell. You just ignore them. You just walk or drive past, and by the time you come back that way, they’re usually gone.

The people that come to college campuses and street corners and protest against protests know that they probably won’t change anyone’s mind. But they know that they’ll give those who are considering the bigoted ideas and think about voicing them an opportunity to speak with hate.

If every student that had walked past the man in my college’s center had just rolled their eyes, put in their headphones, and just kept walking, how long would he have stayed? Would he have stood there in the sun shouting for longer than twenty minutes if he wasn’t getting any attention? He might have stayed for thirty minutes and maybe if he was desperate, forty minutes. But I doubt he would have made it past the hour mark if everyone had ignored them.

These kinds of people feed off attention and discord. They want a scene to be caused. They want a yelling match to happen and get caught on camera and then distributed. Because even if the point of the video is to vilify them, they’re still getting their message spread to the masses.

You can’t acknowledge these people. In doing so, you’re giving legitimacy to the concept that their ideals may be correct. But they’re not. Not every argument is two sided, some are only one sided. You can’t give a voice to those who are just wrong, and you can’t give them equal exposure.

There is a time for protest and fighting back. There are things that warrant a debate, and things that don’t. Sometimes silence can be the best weapon in fighting back and deterring unchangeable ignorance.