Hello friends and family of the Pinecrest Tribune! I hope everyone has been having a wonderful summer and has been staying updated and open-minded about current events.
While I do appreciate the positive feedback that I receive for my articles, I will say that there are some negative responses that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, but were to be expected.
As a columnist for this paper, my goal is to unite the community by introducing community members to different perspectives about various social/political events and movements with the foundation of my research and personal experience. However, I seemed to have failed being that some of my community members have emailed me calling me many things including “young and dumb” and “an extreme leftist”.
So, here’s what I want to do. I would love for my fellow community members to email me or send in any views or opinions that they have about any article that I have written in the past, or about any current social/political movement or event. What I will do is anonymously state your view/opinion, and respond to them. Some might ask “What is the point of this?”
For those who may not know, I attend the University of National Champions, AKA the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I am currently majoring in Psychology. A phenomenon that has repeatedly been brought to the table in every single one of my psychology classes is group polarization. According to <psychcentral.com>, group polarization is “a phenomenon wherein the decisions and opinions of people in a group setting become more extreme than their actual, privately held beliefs”, simply due to lack of exposure of other group opinions. So, what is the point of all of this? The answer is simple: to create conversation.
Nowadays, I feel as though our communities are so divided. Like I mentioned, my goal is to unite everyone, and I feel as though the first step to doing so is creating a conversation so that we can come together and respectively state our opinions, but also to be empathetic and find the sense in others’ opinions to gradually decline the effects of group polarization. The more we create a conversation, the more chance we have towards reaching common ground and uniting.
The lines are open people! Send in your comments, opinions, views. Let’s talk about things while we still have an opportunity to move toward a brighter, more undivided future. You guys will now be the captains of the unity ship.
Khara Vassell graduated from Gulliver Preparatory High School. At Gulliver she received All-State Honors three out of four years on the Varsity Soccer team. She was also an active member in the G.O.A.L.S. club where she coached kids with autism and taught them how to play soccer. Vassell is the founder of her own non-profit organization called “Island Kids Soccer Charity” where she collects soccer gear for orphans in the Caribbean, ships the gear off to the orphanages and later heads to the orphanages to host soccer clinics to teach these orphans how to play and to give the gear out. She is now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and is a member of the varsity soccer team. She can be reached by email kagv08@gmail.com.
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