Being The Daily Collegian's opinion page editor was one of the strangest, most edifying experiences of my life.

Through reading between five and 50 letters to the editor a day, I learned more about my fellow Penn Staters, my generation and my country's political culture than I ever thought possible. Through all of the letters, through all of the ideas and the bickering, I noticed one perspective that seemed to pervade them all: It's us against them.

Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, and everyone in between, all seemed to adhere to the notion that their ideas were under attack, that their way of thinking, while of course utterly correct, was also somehow on the fringe, on the brink of being destroyed by "the other guy." I have no idea where this feeling of victimhood comes from.

The letters I received on any given topic were almost always equally divided between so-called liberal or conservative ideologies. And on a campus of 40,000 people, it is unlikely that most people's views are as threatened or as singular as they would like to believe.

The question I was left with at the end of my tenure as opinion page editor last semester was, "Why?" Why do people like to believe their views are threatened? Why do people like to believe that they are the eternal underdog? The only answer I can reach is that these feelings are empowering. It seems many people believe that being the underdog somehow lends a measure of righteousness to a cause, and further, a measure of credibility. Being misunderstood, it seems, is a badge of honor. It was this sort of thinking, more than anything else I was faced with, that bothered me most.

Why do I have to be wrong for you to be right? How does my being wrong make you more right? Why is it necessary to constantly feed off of conflict?

What I find most troubling about these types of false dichotomies is that they serve to blind people from real oppression. Many would argue that the term "real oppression" is a relative one, that it depends entirely on the person judging between different forms of oppression. That's probably true.

But it seems to me that some forms of oppression are more extensive and desperate than others. Child slavery in Sudan, sitting for months on end in a prison in Cuba without being charged with a crime, being denied access to quality education because of your race, your income level or where you live -- these for me are examples of real oppression.

It's not that I believe that other, more subtle forms of oppression are less legitimate. For me, the problem arises when we become so caught up in what we think are our own struggles for justice that we are unable to see other people's suffering. Because of the assumed righteousness of the underdog, we have somehow come to believe that the act of having or asserting an opinion is a burden.

But if we all walk around carrying the weight of being misunderstood, how will we have any energy left to fight other, probably more important battles?

To thrive on conflict is not human nature, as so many people falsely assume. This is a Western and particularly American outlook, and one I believe is important for our generation to break free from. I'm not saying we should "all just get along." Disagreement and debate is an important part of public discourse. But I do believe that we need to learn to assert ourselves positively.

Don't tell me what you believe in opposition to another viewpoint; simply tell me what you believe. Don't tear someone else down to build yourself up. And don't believe that by labeling your views as threatened, you have somehow given yourself a level of credibility. Credibility comes from making a connection with those you are attempting to reach.

If we as a generation want to look beyond ourselves, to help ease other's suffering, we need to focus on the connections rather than the conflicts.