Here’s a hypothetical situation. Four roommates live in a suite in Buchanan Towers. To those unfamiliar with that dorm, a suite consists of two bedrooms attached to a common area.

These roommates like each other well enough. They keep the place clean. They don’t disturb each other with loud parties. Everyone’s pretty happy.

Then one day, one of them starts seeing a guy who likes to carry a giant sign wherever he goes. It shows a photo of an aborted fetus next to a photo of Holocaust victims. The word “GENOCIDE” is written in big bold letters, comparing abortion to the Holocaust.

The roommate and her new boyfriend think this message is pretty important, so they start spending all of their time in the common area of her dorm so her roommates can see the poster. In her worldview, abortion is exactly what the sign says it is.

Roommate number two wakes up one day to find this exhibit in her living room. She’s appalled. She feels a woman has a right to decide if she wants to carry a fetus. It is her body and no one else has a right to tell her what she can and cannot do with it.

So she finds some poster paper and markers and makes her own signs reaffirming her right to choose. She sets herself up in the living room as a counter protest. She never actually speaks to her roommate.

Roommate number three wakes up to check out the commotion. This woman moved with her family to America in the mid-nineties after escaping the genocide in Rwanda. She survived but not without seeing her neighbors, friends and family members slaughtered.

This roommate doesn’t like having her entire ethnic group compared to something that’s ability to sense pain has not been confirmed by scientists.

She knows very well that genocide is the intentional slaughter of an ethnic group, not abortion.

She sets up her own protest in the common room. She also doesn’t talk to anyone else.

The last roommate in the suite doesn’t really have strong opinions on abortion, but she still needs to go to the bathroom or leave the suite once in a while. To do that, she needs to pass by all that bad karma.

Western is like this suite every May when Western for Life invites the anti-abortion protest group Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) to campus. We too have a shared space in Red Square.

Some people agree with the GAP but most don’t. Some people avoid Red Square all together. For the past two years, I do not get the impression that too many protesters or counter protesters talked to each other either (aside from yelling at a long distance).

These protests are just like the issue they are about. They drive a wedge into our campus. They make people angry. People on opposite sides of the fence don’t respect each other as human beings with valid opinions.

Protests are an important part of our democracy, but these protests aren’t accomplishing anything other than reinforcing the personal views of the protesters. In my humble opinion, we all need to take a chill pill, sit down and talk about this issue in a way that doesn’t involve 10-foot high posters of dead people.

What would these hypothetical roommates do? Well, their Resident Advisor would sit them all down and try to get them to see each other’s points of view. They would have to use “I feel” statements (“I feel offended that you compared abortion to genocide.”) instead of accusatory statements.

(“You are a bitch!”) The boyfriend would not come to this meeting because he does not live there.

They would work out their differences. Meetings like this don’t always work, but they will if the roommates want to be friends again. As a campus we should do the same. We need an environment where Western students can talk about and debate this issue without professional protesters from the outside world trying to shove their message down our throats.

We need an environment where we can respect each other first and disagree second.

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