The Globe’s opinion team bids everyone a fond, weird farewell

The+Globe%E2%80%99s+opinion+team+bids+everyone+a+fond%2C+weird+farewell

Written By Laura Byko, Jane McAnallen, and Johanna Wharran

It feels like we’re leaving at a bad time.

When we started here at the Globe, Barack Obama was president and the world did not feel as though it were on fire.

Now Donald Trump is our president-elect, and everything feels like it is on fire.

There will be a lot of opinions to have and to write about in the coming years, for sure. And we won’t get to write about them. “We” in this case refers to Laura Byko, Jane McAnallen and Johanna Wharran, three longstanding members of the Globe Opinions team. This is our collective last semester at the Globe, and this article is our collective goodbye to it.

Over the years, The Globe has been a job to us, a joke to us, a nightmare and a home to us. Five editors-in-chief from our hiring, this newspaper has finally gotten rid of us.

The three of us have become not only friends, co-workers and roommates, but family in this newsroom. It’s safe to say we spent more time laughing than we ever did working.

This opinions section, however, has also remained fairly stagnant in the three years we’ve exercised vise-like control over it. We’re all leftist queers who love absurdism, and this section has reflected that. It is probably healthy and good for someone with a slightly different perspective to take over, although our opinions remain correct. Remember that, at least, faithful readers of the Globe: Our opinions were always correct, and arguing with them was a waste of time and effort.

We had the great privilege of running and writing some deeply weird pieces, holding our breath when submitting them, and then finding that they were our best-received articles.

(One in particular about a Rat King still gets referenced occasionally.)

It’s truly special when you find someone, or someones, who you can collaborate with in a way that raises the level of everyone’s work. Having people to bounce ideas off of, whom you can go to knowing that they’ll point you in a better direction or help hone in on your opinion, or even add those last elusive 100 or so words to an article. Even if two of those someones continue to shoot down the third someone’s unmanageably lengthy but incredibly correct and good thoughts on communism.

Working together made us better people with better opinions. Even if we never work together again, we all have a little rat king inside us now.

Thank you to our five editors: Sara Payne giving us our jobs, Andrew Goldstein for giving us a semester to remember, Jon Andreassi for never being able to say no to us, Kristin for being a friend, and Josh for being a beautiful angel child. Thanks also to the Globe, for giving us the highlights of our college experience.

Here’s hoping we aren’t the last set of editors to make terrible publication choices in the name of comedy and desperation.

So goodbye to the place where we’ve spent our Mondays for the past three years. Goodbye to the friends we wouldn’t have met otherwise and who have helped to shape us into who we are. Goodbye to the quote wall and the heinous words written on it.

Goodbye to the Globe. Be weird, be imaginative, and you won’t believe what they let you get away with in these pages.

For one last time, opinions out.