Presidential debate raises questions about our beliefs

Squinting at a small computer screen, college students across the country streamed the first presidential debate from their dorm rooms on Monday, Sept. 26. For most college students, this is the first election cycle that warrants our voice with any degree of authority. This is the first time we are eligible to vote. Fortunately, this milestone coincides with our journey to sculpting our own political identity. After 18 years living under our parents’ roofs, we are both liberated and abandoned on our quest to find our political ideologies.

Throughout high school, our political beliefs were dependent on our parents’ opinions. Perhaps, your beliefs still align with your parents. Contrastingly, maybe your opinions are now more parallel to your peers’ than your parents’. However, at the core, a person’s individual experiences and environments determine their opinions. College is one of these pressurizing environments.

So, the day after college students across the country submitted to the debate, watching redundant and already known babble hiccup out of the candidates’ mouths, small talk about the previous night’s events was littered into many conversations.

In my first class, a literature class, my professor greeted us with frustrated commentary about the debate. Essentially, he was hinting at the inevitable futility of such a situation; we’ve already heard the candidates’ views, and we’ve already decided whom we support. Either outright or subconsciously, we know who we’re voting for—unless something unexpected were to shock us.

After admitting to not watching the debate, my professor asked,  “Was anyone like, ‘I learned something’?” to which a student responded, “It was pretty much what was expected.”

We weren’t shocked. We went into viewing the debate—on a low-quality, stuttering live stream—knowing exactly what would be said. My professor further discussed the predictability of the debate by likening it to a Superbowl match between the Patriots and the Cowboys. The Cowboys, the underdogs, are validated as qualified contenders merely by making it to the field. But in the end, the expected prevails and, as my professor put it, it’s “depressing.”

The class proceeded as planned, leaving the vague sentiments regarding the debate to fester in the back of our minds ,as the professor talked about Poe and Freud. Somehow, more debate commentary seeped into the discussion about halfway through the 75-minute class.

Before heading to work, the professor was perusing the web to compensate for not watching the debate. He came across an article in a French newspaper that put the candidates’ orations to a linguistic test, analyzing syllables, in order to determine the age level at which the candidates were speaking. My professor relayed that Trump spoke at a 9-year-old’s vocabulary level according to this test. Expanding on this, my professor said that not only was the debate predictable, but the points addressed weren’t even debatable. He stated that Trump’s words were simplified to the point where “we don’t have to debate this, we all know what these words mean.”

So, how does this small talk, these rhetorical suggestions, sway our opinions? Does the inclusion of political conversation—however brief or objective—influence our outlook to a malleable degree? These are questions I pondered while listening to my professor lecture about Freud’s obsession with castration in the context of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”

Regardless of the context of how we receive others’ opinions, we should question the origin of our own opinions in order to sift through spoon-fed beliefs from personally cultivated opinions. Furthermore, we need to decide if the distinction even matters. As we go to fill out the presidential ballot for the first time, we will think back on our formulated standpoint, and taking on a psychoanalytic eye, we will question how we came to our decision. The expectedness of the entire situation might just collapse and we might emerge with renewed clarity.

Stephanie Haenn is a sophomore Writing Seminars and English double major from Philadelphia.