What will renew us?

For as long as I have been conscious of such things, bitter confrontation has characterized the political process of the United States of America.

I do not mistake the mudslinging practiced by my elected representatives for debate, and I do crave something better, but by now I am conditioned to endure this state of partisanship, one which can best be described as violent.

I am so thoroughly conditioned that it did not surprise or even upset me that politics at Princeton looked and sounded remarkably similar to what I read in the papers about Washington, D.C. Abortion rights advocates clashed with conservative Christians; proponents of traditional morality confronted any and every move made by LGBT students; and the College Republicans and College Democrats fought about everything.

I chalked up to "politics" vitriolic ad hominem attacks in print, student groups bringing agents of intolerance to speak on campus, the seemingly-annual vandalization of the LGBT Center's Pride Week advertisements, day after day of mostly substance-free protest in front of Frist and the careless splashing of inflammatory images across the covers of campus publications.

I no longer view politics at Princeton so uncritically. I no longer accept the proposition, implicit in the often hateful exchanges of letters on this page, that Princeton can at best be a gladiatorial training school or a nursery for political thugs. I want us to rebel against all of that.

Do not mistake this for a plea for politeness and civility. Those may be fine for restoring order, but I think we can have greater ambitions than to be polite to one another. I want something new and better — a kind of politics that takes us out of our roles as junior versions of the cynical and shortsighted men and women who run our country and respects that our time at Princeton is, or should be, one of rapid and intense intellectual development.

I want us to declare our intellectual independence and to pledge allegiance only to the pursuit of our own truths.

Labels like Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or pro-life may not survive our declaration. They may not be able to contain the complexity of our positions — we may find that reducing our thinking on an issue or set of issues to a single word or name no longer suffices.

If we all decide to undergo this very personal rebellion and reconstruct during our remaining time at Princeton a new and individual understanding of how the political world is ordered, I think Princeton will start to look different — maybe a little more like the Forum and less like the Colosseum.

Of course, I cannot say exactly what we will achieve if we start to practice this new kind of politics at Princeton, but I do know where we will find ourselves after another year of bickering and slander: weary and frustrated, and having made no more real progress on the issues which now divide us. This is a prospect that I cannot bear, because our capacity to do better is staggering.

I have one more year left here. I do not want my class to leave Princeton divided along lines drawn for us by previous generations. As we emerge from Princeton, can we have a common purpose? Can we struggle not against one other but together for a better future?

I ask out of desperation. I do not want to face global warming divided, and I do not want us to face AIDS or poverty divided because I know that if we face those issues divided we will fail to solve them, just as our parents have. Thomas Bohnett is a Wilson School major from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.