Columnist Lindsay Muneton warns the Penn community on the danger and significance of Trump's new policies.
Credit: Abhiram JuvvadiOnly a few weeks have passed since the presidential inauguration, and my inbox is close to reaching its limits. Every time my phone buzzes, I’m left feeling slightly hopeful before I am forced to face the reality of our situation. Never has an email from The New York Times left me with such dread that I actually considered throwing my phone across the room. In the past four years, I can barely remember a time when a president walking into a press conference wasn’t brushed over after a month or made into the punchline for a joke. But we seem to have reached a point where our fear for the future has replaced complacency for our current circumstances, and maybe that’s the problem.
We have spent so much of our time making clever quips about the previous administration’s ineffectiveness, and now we make jokes about the price of groceries. On every side of the board, all I can hear is the “I told you so” present in someone’s tone, but we should feel no vindication about correctly predicting present events when we neglected the previous alarm signals. Yes, we might be scared (or borderline terrified) of this horrifying turn of events, but they needed to happen.
In a world where news is reported rapidly and we can easily scroll past events that don’t immediately pique our interest, the events of today easily become the stories of yesterday. I don’t want to put my faith in this argument; I wholeheartedly believe that we are more than iPad kids with small attention spans. In fact, we have already lived through a global pandemic, a previous Trump administration, and an attempted insurrection; to put things simply: It’s been a lot. To come out of those major events without becoming slightly desensitized to the decisions of our government would be too much to ask. What the actions of the current administration do is force us to acknowledge the extremity of the situation. I have heard countless people urge us to relax, especially since we already survived Donald Trump once. Considering the actions Trump took before he even took office, relaxing is no longer a possibility; these are actions that we can no longer ignore.
When Elon Musk showed up at Trump’s campaign rallies, we mocked his bizarre stage leaps. Now, he is merely one of multiple oligarchs or “businessmen” to share the front row of the inauguration. When we got inklings of a TikTok ban, we heard groans of a post-apocalyptic world without doomscrolling. Now, it’s become cannon fodder to further Trump’s political agenda, as TikTok’s owners make shameless appeals to keep it running. When we heard Trump denigrate Kamala Harris’ multiracial background when he made claims she had suddenly “turned Black,” we marked it up to the crazy ramblings of an incompetent moron. Now, he has signed an executive order to remove birthright citizenship after running for his office against a woman whose parents were both immigrants. Is this pattern ringing bells for anyone?
The executive orders made in this past week are not ones we can merely shrug off, especially as they start infiltrating our campus. If there’s anything I’ve learned since coming to Penn, it’s that nothing screams anxiety like getting a “Message to the Penn Community” email. With the attempts to freeze federal funding, deport at least 3% of our population, and stamp out any diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, what we can be certain of is that we, along with our classmates, will be affected in one way or the other.
Obviously, it is not possible that the majority of the student body is politically unaware or wholly apathetic; Penn is not so polarized. In this previous year there were multiple protests, an encampment, and an annoying number of people on Locust Walk asking me if I was registered to vote in the election. Criticizing the government is a longstanding American tradition, but with schoolwork, clubs and our personal affairs, it can become far too easy to look the other way.
No one is claiming to know exactly what will happen in the next four years or the next month or even the next hour. No one is saying that we should all join our Democratic Party chapter or become full-time activists, but the least we can do is care — even when caring becomes difficult. The consequences do not disappear simply because we choose not to think about them. These new issues that concern our future may remain out of sight, but they are never out of mind.
LINDSAY MUNETON is a College sophomore studying sociology from Bergenfield, N.J. Her email address is lmuneton@sas.upenn.edu.
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