It’s women and children first and the men stay behind to help out, but to be honest, there are some men I wouldn’t want helping in a serious situation and some women I would pick first to help.

Walking through the Doudna Fine Arts Center Monday, I overheard a group of people talking about when they moved in. Snippets of conversation floated to my ears, such as “I wouldn’t have called (her), she’s no help. I needed a man’s strength.”

Despite not being widespread sexism, those small acts of sexism help perpetrate a culture that still considers women and really anybody not the archetypical male to be second-class.

Ideas like those — that women cannot help move based solely on the fact they are women — foster into more serious variations of sexism and exclusion that should not be tolerated.

Being at a university means you are able to accept a higher form of thinking, not a high school style of thought. And honestly, discriminating simply based on sex is quite high school.

While this university and the students here do things every day to make others proud, there are also things individuals should work on. That is the point of college, isn’t it — to better oneself, be it academically, socially, spiritually, or whatever.

Don’t subscribe to a pool of thought where you believe you’re better than someone else based on an arbitrary quality. Make sure you better yourself in other ways to gain that confidence.

If you don’t, then when you do happen upon people who don’t share your narrow-minded views (say, at a job interview), then it might not seem like such a joke.

College is supposed to test your boundaries, help shape you into the person you want to be, so make sure you’re not turning into someone you were a few years ago.

I mean, after all it’s 2014. I would hope we would be a bit more sophisticated, instead of still acting like it’s 1910.

Generation after generation, history unfolds to us mistakes of the past. Don’t let the history books be riddled with accounts of how small acts of sexism blossomed into larger acts — such things should have been done away with by now.

Instead, really reconsider how you have an outer look at others — and this is targeted for everyone, because sexism isn’t just a male targeting a female type of abomination.

This is a problem every person everywhere faces, but we are so much more enlightened than those before us. We have the knowledge, the power, and the accessibility to eradicate behavior like this forever. It just takes one person at a time.

Bob Galuski is a senior English and journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].