Politics is like a pendulum; it goes from one extreme to another, and if you’re lucky eventually it will slow down, and you’ll end up somewhere in the center. Right now, it is hard to see the center, with all the right-wing rhetoric and a resurgence in anti-trans rhetoric and laws. Kansas is just one such example of the right-wing push against the “woke” left.
In February, Zane Irwin reported through KCUR and NPR, that Kansas’s Republican supermajority overruled Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto that would have stopped the passage of a bill that bans transgender people from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity and invalidates licenses and birth certificates that do not align with their current gender.
While laws like these might not directly affect those living in Massachusetts, Professor Seth Ridinger, a history professor at Northern Essex Community College said, “national issues take up the most room in our local discourse, and therefore, do impact us on a local level.”
Professor Steve Russell, also a history professor at NECC, believes that limiting people’s licenses is “plain stupid.”
Russell went on to explain that it’s important for people to be certified to drive. Licenses provide proof that you know the rules of the road, and if we are limiting the ability of people to obtain this certification due to other issues like immigration or gender identity, it is bad for the state and the federal government. If people can’t legally get to work, they can’t provide for themselves or their families which then means they end up surviving off charity or the government.
The United States has seen this type of extreme before. Russell believes that the level of our polarization is something seen before during the American Civil War. While thankfully he doesn’t think we’ll have another civil war, he did offer up some advice on what people can learn from history.
Russell, said, “if you ignore ideas … that you don’t like, you risk being blind-sided.”
Ridinger thinks there is hope. The year 1968 was filled with strife, the riots in Chicago, escalating Vietnam War and the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, despite all this it still landed on a high. The United States watched as Apollo 8 orbited the moon. Ridinger said “I believe this event gave the nation hope for the future, hope at how, despite adversity and conflict, we can come together to achieve great things.”
No students have responded to requests for interviews from the Global Politics Club or Gender and Sexuality Alliance.
