“When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have
been humiliated in what amounts to a college-hazing incident, rest
assured that I don’t care,” reads one email presently circulating among
America’s conservatives.
Another reports that Democratic presidential candidate Sen.
Barack H. Obama “takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a
Muslim.”
Among the politically semi-aware, screeds like these are the
new chain mail. Their viral propagation makes them an incredibly
powerful means of preaching to the choir.
When it comes to winning converts, however, the missives fall
short of being compelling, particularly when they wind up in the
inboxes of college students who are active members of left-leaning
campus organizations. Alas, that doesn’t keep these kids’ parents from
sending them unwelcome bits of political wisdom. Over and over again.
Each of the two e-mails quoted above made their way to members
of the Harvard College Democrats last week. They were each sent by
friends and relatives back home who were apparently unwilling to watch
their kin slide freely into Harvard’s pinko leftist abyss.
I think it’s fair to assume that a lot more people leave
Harvard with liberal political views than arrive here that way.
Surrounded by left-wing peers, taught by left-wing professors, and
bombarded with the campus media’s left-wing bias, it’s more than a
little difficult to graduate with the ability to say “family values,”
“trickle-down effect,” or “the invisible hand” with a straight face.
(I’m sure there are some Harvard students who make it through
four years without becoming pretentious ivory tower liberals like the
rest of us. But you don’t tend to meet those people writing for The
Crimson.)
Parents seem to be acutely aware of what sort of environment
their children are entering when they come to Harvard. Amid all the
usual anxieties about their kids’ growing up and moving out—will they
succeed, will they make friends, will the linens I ordered from Ikea be
long enough, and so on—there’s an extra fear for some.
Will my son come home a liberal?
Joshua D. Smith ’08 did precisely that. A native of Plant City,
Florida—the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World—Smith left home with
his conservative credentials intact, and returned having been elected
co-chair of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters
Alliance (BGLTSA). But the e-mails preaching the right-wing gospel have
kept on coming.
“The problem with these e-mails is that they comprise about 50
percent of the e-mails from my family and family friends,” Smith says.
He has a hard time appreciating the family pictures, jokes, and
anecdotes that make the trip from Plant City to ever-so-liberal
Cambridge, when they’re overshadowed by the vitriolic diatribes that
arrive with them.
“The e-mails I get that make false/racist views of the war in
Iraq and the Muslim community here and abroad aggravate me to no end,”
Smith says. “This makes me want to request that they stop sending me
e-mails of that nature, but I don’t want to lose my connection with
them any more than I already have by coming out to them as
a—gasp—liberal.”
It’s a precarious—and frightening—balance for many Harvard
students. Alienating one’s parents is at best an unsavory prospect, but
dealing with waves of political junk mail from them isn’t much more
appealing. Some send angry responses, some ask their families to cut it
out, and others simply ignore the e-mails entirely. I fit into the
latter group. When I got tired of reading about “former president Jimmy
Carter’s anti-Israel frenzy,” I put a spam filter on messages from my
mom. Lo and behold, the e-mails stopped coming.
My mom’s motives, and those of Josh Smith’s parents, are
fairly easy to understand. With their pride and joy off at Harvard,
that ivy-encrusted boot camp for America’s liberal elite, the least
they can possibly do is try to get a word in edgewise. It’s a political
umbilical cord that connects to a totally different universe, and
growing up being the way it is, it’s hard not to be a little peeved at
the insistence with which the unwelcome manifestos keep on coming.
And to be fair, a lot of the stuff that shows up is very interesting, however wrong it might be.
As politicos across the country ride the wave from last year’s
midterm elections to the presidential contest in 2008, politics in this
country are going to stay as personal as ever for the foreseeable
future. For Josh and me, that means a lot more parental spam.
It’s our job to understand their motives, and to appreciate
that the separation anxiety that runs just beneath the surface of our
interactions is very real on both sides. To a parent, seeing your
child’s politics change while they’re away from home and out of your
grasp has got to be agonizing. It’s a little more change, a little more
distance. That can’t be easy to watch.
Meanwhile, it’s up to our parents to understand that our
assertiveness isn’t just petulant immaturity. We’re capable of making
our own judgments when it comes to politics, and we ought to be trusted
to manage our own opinions. And our inboxes.
Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears regularly.
Read more in Opinion
Obamaphobia