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Owen's Story

Owen talks about his decision to go to college as a way to avoid the Vietnam War. He talks about how this experience exposed him to a whole new demographic of people and allowed him to see people for who they were as opposed to the stereotypes they had been socialized to believe. Education served as a bridge across cultures, creating the ability to connect with people of all backgrounds.

Owen's Story
00:00 / 03:11

When I was 19, approximately, there was something going on called the Vietnam war, and you probably studied it in ancient history or something like that. But for those of us who didn’t really want get out there and get shot at, we had to find eats to not do that. And we also didn’t really believe that war was necessary. So I was part of a group of people, there are many, many of us, who said, no, this is not a good idea. And the only way I could stay out was to go to college. And so I went to college. And another thing that’s big in my life is when I went into college I was meeting different people from different parts of the world and more so different parts of the country. But I did meet a few people from outside the US. And some people have big influences on you. Some people have small influences on you, and some people you just don’t understand. And part of the non-understanding is you have to learn to accept people as they are. I would say the majority of kids that I was in classes with were white, from middle-class suburban cities around middle-class suburbs, from large cities around the country. I went to school in St. Louis, and I came from a suburb of Washington DC. but there were so many people from so many other places that were similar to me. And then I got to meet people who were different than me. I remember one young woman came from Hawaii, and she was native Hawaiian, and that was cool. I mean, I’d never met anybody from Hawaii before. And one day it snowed and she ran outside, and she just went absolutely beserk running between the snowflakes because she had read about it, she’d seen it in movies, but she had never experienced snow before. And i’m going, okay, this is cool. You know, I’m just trying to understand somebody’s frame of mind, especially when you grow up with snow. You know it’s like, what’s just snow? It’s like, no, this was like a life-altering event for her. And I said, okay, that’s cool. You know, you don’t, it’s to be able to do that and not to judge somebody based on things like that. And I grew up in a society where a lot of people were not accepted as they were. A lot of minorities were looked down upon and legally discriminated against. And, you know, that sort of has gone away, but not entirely. There was no such thing as people who were openly gay. That just didn’t happen during that period of time. People did not date interracially. You never saw, you know, a white woman with a black guy. I mean it just didn’t happen. So when you start meeting people that are different and meeting people a little outside of your realm of experience, you learn about them and you learn to accept them. And that was a huge thing for me, to transition from living with stereotypes, which were reinforced by things like tv shows, to getting to know people and understanding who the people were. And you know, understanding a person as a person, not just put into a category, a stereotype. Part of going to school was that piece of education.

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