If I were to give a review of trying to finish college as humanity plunges into a hell of its own creation, I would really have to go with one star. At the very least, though, my time at Trinity has allowed me to develop some unique insights into how people think through education and observation.
Taking many humanities courses and having a masochistic hyperfixation on politics has allowed me to develop my pattern recognition skills. Aside from that, I have been involved with various different journalistic jobs here at Trinitonian and at the San Antonio Current — and have also participated in student political organizing. These experiences — in between crippling bouts of existential dread, sorrow and rage — have put me in touch with a pretty broad range of perspectives.
Consequently, I have noticed continuous and significant changes in how people think about the various national and global crises we are facing. When I first enrolled at Trinity, I generally felt like an outlier in that I am a communist. Most people I met had some amount of faith in the status quo even if they thought it needed massive reform. I used to be the most hard line lefty in most social groups here, but as time has gone on, my opinions seem to be less controversial, and there seem to be more voices that echo my thoughts.
Working for the Trinitonian, I occasionally peruse issues of the paper from decades past. In the past, conservative students had a very prominent voice, with many columnists and guest columnists having written pieces defending the Iraq War in the 2000s and hotly divided issues such as gay marriage.
In my estimation, the disastrous Bush and Trump administrations, as well as the climate crisis being perpetually ignored or denied by Republicans despite being a matter of scientific consensus, shifted the opinions of educated people before I arrived at Trinity.
If global happenings were crazy before I got to Trinity, though, then I could only call the past four years the prelude to total mayhem. My college career has coincided with Russia invading Ukraine, Israel launching a massive ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and Republicans winning a massive electoral sweep before starting the process of gutting every U.S. institution and eradicating due process. In the context of all this, I believe the words of “dirty commies” like me are starting to reach people as the status quo seems less appealing by the day.
These days, while there are still plenty of conservatives on campus, in my experience they tend to be the people that are not dialed into specific political and social issues. The exceptions are few, and for the most part, are all members of Trinity’s Young Conservatives of Texas chapter.
In decades past, Trinity YCT had a fairly noble reputation, being a very big organization and one that conducted itself with a high degree of professionalism. These days, while they are still making headlines, the best they can do is bring controversial grifters to campus in desperate ploys for relevancy.
Conversely, I enrolled at Trinity just after the COVID-19 pandemic caused TU Progressives and Trinity’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter to dissolve. Since then, I have witnessed two independent and impressive efforts to relaunch both organizations as mainstays on campus.
More encouraging to me is that “normal people” — people not involved in political organizing — seem to be coming around to new ideas. I no longer feel particularly hesitant to criticize capitalism or the ruling class, as people tend to understand where I’m coming from much more now even if they do not fully agree. This is true even among people I would not expect, such as my classmates in my computer science courses.
More people are becoming aware that social hierarchies — namely rigid notions of gender, race and sexuality — are artificial and meaningless. Some are even starting to make the connection that capitalism relies on social and economic inequality to survive. Its hierarchy is the only way to justify and maintain a system of mass exploitation.
Beyond mere exploitation, people have also been much more receptive when I discuss how capitalism is intrinsically related to colonialism. As the U.S. blatantly justifies Israeli war crimes in defiance of the international community, it is becoming much harder for people to ignore. Capitalism very directly leads to these sorts of atrocities. I see people starting to come to terms with this frequently now, when before getting people to understand this was like pulling teeth.
The social progress of recent decades has frightened the ruling class: Those in our society that control the vast majority of its wealth despite making up a tiny fraction of its population. For them, social progress is a disaster that will inevitably undermine every justification they have for their wealth and power. In response, they are turning to the state, with the Trump administration as their proxy, to inflict state violence to counteract this progress.
With that said, there are a great number of people in U.S. society — the people running the shell of YCT being some examples — that are terrified of social progress because it may undermine their own privilege. Thanks to our completely broken electoral system, there are enough of these people to constitute a critical mass of support for the ruling class, but that does not change the fact that capitalism is on borrowed time.
Try as they might, conservatives cannot put the genie back in the bottle. People are achieving political and social consciousness in ways I never thought possible, and this consciousness is spreading like a virus. The revolution will come, but it will not be televised. Rather, it lives in the hearts of your friends and neighbors.
