Alex Serrano

As many of you may know, the week before last, there was an incident. A white, male student on the SMCC South Portland campus pulled the hijab off of a woman’s head. This, in the wake of the Donald Trump tapes and ever-increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from the abhorrent right-wing of America, is absolutely and completely unacceptable.

How dare anybody, anybody of any race or creed, disrespect another human’s physical space. I shudder to think that there are people out there in the world who look at anybody else and see anything other than a human being to be respected for their own views. And that’s before bristling at a little culture, before taking some extreme action against anything which is different.

As men, and as white people in a very white place, we are at the top of the food chain. That’s not how it should be, but that’s the reality that we live in. And to deny people of color, or the LGBT community, or those with different religious practices the same rights and respect as everyone else is cruel. It’s cruel and unusual and goes against everything that the United States represents, as a free place where people can go to be free.

To see a person who very well may become the forty-fifth President of the United States essentially condone sexual assault on a national scale is gut-wrenching. And then to dismiss this as “locker talk”? It takes everything in me not to throw the nearest object at a wall—to explode in some sort of glorious retribution. This is some caustic, high-school level misogyny, and we cannot dismiss such behavior and language.

First of all, nine women in total, so far, have corroborated stories of Donald Trump groping or assaulting them in this or a similar manner. Second of all, the “boys will be boys” defense holds no water. “Boys will be boys” is what you say about the stupid twelve year-olds throwing mud at each other and running through bramble patches because they’re ludicrously immature. “Boys will be boys,” until somebody takes it upon themselves to hurt another mentally or physically. “Boys will be boys” has no place in adult society. Yet, even—nay, especially—in the upper echelons of the boardroom class, caustic masculinity and flagrant sexism are more of a problem than ever. We cannot have this man impressing himself on the young people of America and the whole of the world with complete impunity.

So have a little respect.