BY SAMANTHA ENGLISH
T
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counterpoint / april 2017
sophomore on spring break. We watched the GOP fail to repeal the Affordable Care Act that afternoon, but I do not feel victorious. Rather, I had walked the white beach in silence, watching as wave after wave hit the sand like the steady stream of comments from the people around me—my grandmother, aunt, uncles, and extended family—continued to hit me. “You know, they just need to put everyone in a group plan.” “They need to get rid of these medication commercials.” “Oh I love Hillary, I hope she slams him.” “This Time magazine article, I don’t believe in that—you are either a man or a woman.” “The HeShes! Haha!” “Well, the ACA is bad, it does need to be changed.” “I don’t mind Jews, but—” “It’s because they put Obama’s name on the Act that no one wants it.” “Gay people can be gay all they want if
they don’t flaunt it.” “Your uncle, he has white man problems.” I was born with a broken heart. Literally—I had congenital transposition of the great arteries. My grandmother’s third child died of the defect over fifty years ago. I, however, was born into the arms of a teacher and an engineer in 1997, at a San Francisco hospital, where the best pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon for my condition worked. My grandmother knew who he was. She was, after all, a surgical nurse. I spend more time wondering not about what would have happened to me had I been born five or ten years before I was, but instead about what would have happened had I been born in someplace else, into some other set of circumstances, in another state or country, to parents of some other color, economy, background, life. I had a major surgery at seven days old, but money was never a worry. We had insurance—a mark of our privilege.
one that did not vote for him but refuses still to recognize their own privileges and prejudices. The one that my grandmother belongs to; the one that my aunt may not believe in but still plays into. I ignore this reality even as I face it. I am silent at every comment. I turn the television off at every chance I get. I hide in my room. I roll my eyes. I stick my nose into Willa Cather books and text rants to my friends. I am noiseless. I am complicit in this reality of America because of my own individual fears that exist from my own white privileges. You can love people and still doubt them, still admit that they are wrong. My grandmother claims that the decaying buoy we saw on the shores of Flagler Beach is a German warship from World War II. She is wrong there. She claims the graffiti on said buoy is ugly and uncalled for and “ugh those kids” (and I know which kids she means, even if she won’t admit it). When she said this, the morning I left Florida, the morning I got to go back to forgetting the white Americas I do not want to exist, I wanted to tell her she was wrong there too. I like that buoy just the way it is.
I like its spray paint, its crumbling surface, its colors, its images, its ambiguity. I like the way it showed up on the shore like it always belonged there no matter what people thought. I like the way it felt to run up to it this spring break, to stick my hands in the sand pool that was made in its center, to see the many shells and stains left behind as evidence of the people who came and marveled at it before me. It is ugly and beautiful. It is old and new. It is unknown but claimed. It is loving but unapologetic. It is so much better than every three-level, pastelcolored, pristine-American-Dream house we saw all weekend long. Unlike me this past weekend, that buoy does not try in the slightest to be silent in the sleepy beach town of Flagler. It presents its multiple pasts and presents. It shows its truth. And, I suppose, this is me showing mine. Samantha English ’19 (senglis2@wellesley. edu) rejects the little voice she has claimed in the past.
AN
ONYM
Another Umbrella Email
Content warning: explicit descriptions of depression, death, suicidal thoughts, drowning; mentions of ableist terms describing mental health conditions. t’s raining. I am drenched. I brought a raincoat. I’m even wearing it. But somehow I am still drenched. It was a twenty-minute walk from my friend’s house to the Peter, and I got drenched. My hair is sopping. It’s stringy where it is wet and frizzy where it is almost dried.
I
It doesn’t all fit underneath my raincoat’s hood. My jeans are soaked. They’re five shades darker than they were when I put them on this morning. They’re wet and sticking to my thighs like a second skin that I desperately want to shed. My raincoat only reaches halfway down my thighs. My socks are wet. I put on boots this morning and yet somehow, my socks are still wet. My feet hurt and are probably wrinkled beyond belief. My t-shirt has a wet spot on it. The hood on
O US
Content warning: mentions of transphobia, Trump, physical illness, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and antisemitism. here is a “Make America Great Again” sign in front of a blue beach house on the way home from Sally’s Ice Cream. We drive past it, muttering, only to come across a Confederate flag on the next street. “Jesus,” I mumble in between bites of my cone. “Well, don’t you know, that’s the real America!” my grandmother says from behind me, holding up her hands in submission. They are wrinkled from over thirty years of surgical nursing and seventy years of existence. I am her only granddaughter. “It’s the Trumping of America!” my aunt declares from beside me. Healthcrazed and timid, she has not turned the television off all day, keeping MSNBC playing as background noise for our weekend getaway on the beaches of Central Florida. I am her only niece, a
I have never heard about a bill. I live in many different privileged white Americas. Chicago is my hometown. My mother is a Stanford-educated hippie dating a Massachusetts-bred businessman. My father is a libertarian project manager. I have two straight white brothers. I go to Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, which never fails to be a bubble of liberal thought that I feel guiltily blessed to live in. I’m a Democrat. I’m a white cisgender woman. I have health insurance and a U.S. passport and a body that works pretty well. I am sheltered. My Americas are multiple, selfacknowledged realities—but there are many more realities of America. Some of them—the Americas whose voices are silenced over and over again—I want desperately to lift up. Some of them, though, I really want to forget. Wealthy Republican white America, for instance. In my own ignorant fashion, poor Republican white America. And, perhaps most of all, I want to forget the multiprioritized, semi-selfish, halfway ignorant, middle class white America that I know far too well—the one that recognizes Donald Trump is corrupt and evil, the
BY
MANY AMERICAS
MENTAL HEALTH
Image: midatlantic.coastguard.dodlive.mil/ (left). The stars and stripes of the American flag are painted on the “Francis Scott Key” buoy, which marks the spot that inspired the national anthem.
POLITICS
my raincoat comes to a point where all the water streams down. It’s streaming down into my coat. I am drenched, but my umbrella is in my bag. I didn’t use it because at least when I’m drenched and miserable, I’m feeling something. The last time I got caught in the rain, I was in a flimsy white dress kissing a nice girl who I had no business being with. I wasn’t attracted to her. But I was drenched and miserable and thought it might
counterpoint / april 2017
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