As some of you may know I am a graduate student. I am going for my Masters degree in Architecture (no, I’m not a Poli-Sci major).
So, I have class a couple times a week – politics is never an issue. Why should it be? It’s an architecture school. My classes are always thing related to architecture.
Last semester I had bit of an altercation with a professor who taught a class in the classroom before my class. She was showing her class “Bowling For Columbine” and I made an issue of out it. Once she realized where I was going with that one she called me “Joe McCarthy” and needless to say – she looked at me different for the rest of the semester.
All that aside, I don’t recall what the class was about and why they had to watch that – but that was the first time I really noticed politics in a classroom – which fortunate for the professor, I wasn’t in that class.
This week, I have two stories.
Tuesday, as walked into my first class of the evening, there were assignments written on the whiteboard from what I presume to be the previous class.
I was able to get a picture of the assignments with my cell phone camera:

It says:
2/12: read article
#1
2/17: Zinn, read
thru 181
[written ass'm't handed out]
————
Chomsky sem, 2/13
meet at 1 pm
sign up Thursday
So whatever this class is (as of this blogging, I haven’t found out what the class is) they are reading Howard Zinn, and are going to a Noam Chomsky seminar.
Keep in mind this is an architecture school. Why are they reading Zinn and going to Chomsky seminars?
Can someone answer me?
Wednesday night I had another interesting experience.
I easily stick out in a crowd. More often than not, I’m wearing a Bush/Cheney ‘04 baseball cap and a Bush/Cheney pin on jacket.
This class was on building codes… yes, very boring stuff. Nevertheless, we had a guest speaker talking to us about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. When the guest speaker brought this up, my professor reacted with a disgusted lament and said “Did you have to mention him?” and the guest speaker responded “Why? Because you have student in the corner with a Bush hat on?”
Later when class was dismissed, my professor looked at me and said “So Bush/Cheney huh?”
“You better believe it,” I responded. Then, in a joking manner, he asked me my name and pretended to go into in the class roster as if to flag my name for a bad grade.
Sure, a joke it may have been, but what was thinking about later was that it really is risky to be politically conservative in the belly of the liberal beast called Boston. My professor may have been joking, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get discriminated against or looked down upon for being an out-of-the-closet conservative.
On the train ride back home, my brother and I were approached two different times on by other conservatives who saw our Bush-gear and their first comments were about how brave we were to be wearing that stuff in Boston. We offered them Bush/Cheney buttons to wear themselves. They each took one.
This was not the first time we heard those kind of remarks.. From liberals and conservatives a like, we get the same line. What does it say about our society when the masses (especially the liberal masses) spend so much energy on racial, cultural, gender, ethnic, and sexual diversity, but not political or ideological diversity? Why does the Left not tolerate the presence of differing political views? Why do I endure stares and occasional looks of disgust on the train, while they guy across the aisle wearing a John Kerry pin just blends in, or the college student wearing a Howard Dean pin is commended for being politically active?
Now, don’t get me wrong, between my brother and I, we’ve given away over 50 Bush/Cheney buttons either on the train or the streets of Boston, and gotten plenty of good responses from people. They generally outnumber the bad responses – but only because a person more likely to say something for supporting us, rather than to express disapproval.
Boston beware! We conservatives are out there. And we will not be afraid, we will not be deterred. I’ll wear my hat and button with pride and do what I can to get my fellow Boston area conservatives out of the closet you’ve tried to push them into.
We’re out there, and we’re going to do whatever we can to help Bush win Massachusetts in November. If there is any year to do it, it’s this year.