by Anonymous
CW: descriptions of natural disaster
I’m from Southwest Florida, and you can bet anyone who lives in the Gulf Coast region has witnessed a hurricane. Though they are a fairly common occurrence, the effects can be devastating to the families in communities hit the hardest. No hurricane impacted my family as significantly as Hurricane Irma.
Read Moreby Sara Clark ’22
I grew up in a world where George Bush could do no wrong. I remember celebrating his reelection on my fifth birthday, oblivious but excited because the right side had won. I spent his presidency dozing off on my living room couch after dinner, comforted by the familiar voice of Bill O’Reilly praising the leader of the free world.
By Misia Lerska '20
In 1971’s Harold and Maude, Maude tells Harold that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are unique, but who allow themselves to be treated as part of a generalized group. Recently, I’ve noticed that Wellesley’s culture has turned us all into categories. You are defined by a single characteristic—White, Black, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQ, straight, progressive, conservative, white moderate, libertarian, Marxist, capitalist, kind, mean, good, or bad—instead of being a multidimensional, complex individual.
Read MoreBy Olivia Funderburg '18
Content warning: racist hate speech
Nantucket is a tiny island off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts. Only one hundred square miles, the island is home to about ten thousand people year-round, and thousands more who flock there in the summer. It’s a place where everyone knows everyone, a place you don’t want to leave, a place you move back to when it’s time to raise your kids. A safe haven. But on the morning of March 11th, 2018, it was no longer such a friendly place.
Read MoreBy Anonymous
Content warnings: homophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny
When I decided in my first year at Wellesley that I wanted to spend my junior year in France, I hadn’t realized how being a lesbian might affect that experience. As I prepared to leave during sophomore spring, I decided I would not come out to my host family, but remain quietly closeted. In any case, I assumed LGBTQ+ issues would rarely come up and, if they did, that my imagined host family would be tolerant at best or indifferent at worst.
Read MoreBy Anonymous
Content warning: discussion of transphobic rhetoric, mention of restricted eating
Yesterday, a Freedom Project speaker’s presence was an attack on trans students. Last year, it was an attack on assault survivors. What if something changed?
Read MoreBy Charlotte Kaufman
Content warning: description of anti-Palestinian violence
Our bus pulled in from Ramallah to the place that people told me I should not go: Hebron, the formerly thriving capital and largest city in the West Bank of Palestine. Even members of my immediate family warned me it could be dangerous for an American Jew.
Read MoreBy Margaret Flynn Sapia '19
Given the abundance of this year’s news articles, emails, and Facebook posts, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to read another Freedom Project story. I’m sure that the temptation to set down this magazine and do something else (like take a walk, eat some pie, or hide away with your Netflix account) is overtly compelling. Even as I sit down to write this, I’m having trouble knowing what to say. The last thing I want to do is polarize or inflame an already heated campus division, especially so close to the end of the year. However, the dialogue surrounding the Freedom Project has been missing a perspective.
Read MoreContent warning: description of Donald Trump; mention of sexual assault, mental illness, homophobia
The Counterpoint staff recently had a discussion about our Content Warnings Policy, specifically on whether or not we would provide CWs for articles that discuss Donald Trump. We decided as a staff that, as a magazine by Wellesley students for Wellesley students, we should open up the discussion to our campus readers via an anonymous poll and comment section. However, we also as a staff agreed that if just one Wellesley student said that they wanted CW for Donald Trump, we would provide them because we are a magazine for all Wellesley students. Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that we will provide CW for Donald Trump. In addition, though, we have decided to start having more detailed CWs overall. We will now provide three categories of CW, described below. These descriptions will now be available in the inside front cover of every issue of Counterpoint for our reader’s convenience.
Read MoreBy Izzy Labbe '20
Content warnings: mention of sexual assault, eating disorders, Trump
“I’m just trying to figure out what the heck that word means… I’m confused because it seems to mean everything from rudeness to murder, depending on who is using it.”
Read MoreBy Narih Lee '18
Content warning: racial slurs, racism, Trump
It finally dawned on me that it never mattered whether I identified as American; in this country, my thoughts, my words, my actions, my whole self would never be enough.
Read MoreBy Molly Hoyer '18
Content warning: slurs
"When I tell someone I’m offended it’s giving them a chance to rethink their ignorance."
Read MoreCounterpoint staff members share their thoughts on this election and what it means for them:
What saddens me most about all this is that we were so close.
We are not okay. Yet we still stand tall, because we have each other.
Somehow, when I sit down to write something about this, I never seem to be able to get it quite right.
Read MoreBy Francesca Gazzolo '20
We are saturated with thoughts of the coming election. We are swamped, soaked, swallowed and swathed; like a congealing coat of butter around a warm biscuit, it has engulfed us. We are in the deep fryer.
There are thousands of writers out there, far better than I, who have tried to articulate the minutia of our political state. This is not that kind of article. I will not mount the soapbox and preach about any one of those issues, because you simply can’t quantify “importance.” This article serves merely as a piece of my story; because, yes, I am voting for Hillary Clinton.
Read MoreBy Julie Renfroe '19
Distance disconnects us from the world. Distance hides reality from our vision and encloses us in a veil of ignorance.
I always thought distance was a passive thing—I never knew people could use it as a tool to invalidate me.
Read More