I’ve noticed and even experienced a love-hate relationship between WSHS and its students. For as long as I can remember, Winter Springs has never had a good reputation. Whether it be diversity or student relations, there has been a blemish on the reputation of Winter Springs. My experiences when I first started attending WSHS was surprising but not necessarily unexpected. I knew that it wasn’t going to be diverse, but wow. When you get past the culture shock, it’s really not that bad. My first one or two weeks were pretty rough, but that’s with any new school.. Eventually, you start to meet new people. However, when you meet new people you see the good, bad, and the ugly.

You see people who may have a lot of things in common with you. On the other hand, you’re also going to meet people who do not whatsoever. Being able to accept, or at the least tolerate, others who don’t agree with you is important and leads to new friendships but when you fail to develop that understanding, you get tension. I believe this is the major dividing factor at Winter Springs and even America as a whole.

After the 2016 election America was divided and still is. I’ll be the first to admit I do feel a little uneasy and tense when political views are shared because I know how I feel about certain things and people. Sometimes that may lead to silent judgments, but I’m getting better at the whole accepting other’s ideas and going into things with an open mind. Unfortunately, I can’t say that about a lot of Winter Springs. Some people are just really set in their ways and never listen to the other side, but they are just waiting for their turn to speak. Then it turns to not being correct or moral but just being right about your statement. I’ve run into people like that, and they have said some things that are WAY left field. I feel as if I’ve run into so many people who fit that mold, and with that, I have learned that certain conversations just cannot be had with certain people. However the key word “certain” is the true password to the lock that has been deemed impossible to open.

Just because you have run into people who look like a certain group or generally think like a certain group does not necessarily mean the whole group is like that. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are black, white, Hispanic, Democrat, Republican, conservative, or liberal.  When all that is over, we are still human, and everyone deserves a fair chance to talk to an open-minded person.