A few nights ago, I was unfriended on facebook by a person I have known since high school. This was a person I had accepted a friend request from almost as soon as I signed up on facebook back in the stone ages. You know, like about twelve years ago. I am not all that upset that I was unfriended. Frankly, I barely knew this person in high school, and as I think about it now, if you showed me her picture from our yearbook without her name tagged to it, I don't think I could have picked her out.
For reasons you will easily figure out, I will refer to this now ex-friend as "Maga-ette". While Maga-ette was mostly quiet for a long time on facebook, only posting pictures of wineries she visited every now and then and of her grandchildren, once Cadet Bone Spurs got elected, it started. Nothing he could do was wrong. All the problems of the world were caused by "libtards". I debated unfriending her myself, but never got around to it. Then came the events of this week.
It started a few nights earlier, when Mitch McConnell announced that the reason the coronavirus was allowed to spread through the United States as it has is that the president was distracted from the looming disaster by the "impeachment hoax". From there, the inevitable happened. A few right wing pundits backed this statement, none of them showing a bit of proof for the claim that the president was distracted by proceedings in the house that ended in December and in the Senate that was over in the first days of February all the way through the middle of March. Then Maga-ette posted McConnell's statement word for word in boldfaced font on her newsfeed for all to see.
I pointed out to Maga-ette that the impeachment proceedings had long since ended before the president even considered taking the coronavirus threat seriously at all, and in any event, if any politician suffers from such a severe case of attention deficit disorder, perhaps they should not be serving in public office at all. Another friend on my side of the political spectrum added that Cadet Bone Spurs did not seem all that distracted during that time so as to prevent him from running around the country giving campaign speeches and playing golf at his clubs. Maga-ette professed not to know what either of us were talking about. I then explained that he did not seem distracted from making nominations to judicial and government posts. He did not seem distracted from working on deregulation of any number of industries. He did not seem distracted from making speeches or golfing. Why was he distracted from attending to perhaps the single most looming existential threat in history, but nothing else?
Maga-ette responded that in times like this, we should all be working together, which is true. That would have been good enough if it ended there. Instead, she added that it is clear that I do not want to work together for the greater good at this time.
I note that Maga-ette lives about three thousand miles away from me, and to the best of my knowledge has no clue of what I do now or what I did before I semi-retired. So I decided to educate her, at least as to the last two weeks.
During the last two weeks, my wife and I have formed a facebook group called "Stitched Together Long Island". The purpose of the group is to mobilize the home sewing community and get them to make masks for health care professionals on the front line fighting the coronavirus pandemic. We are in just two weeks at just under one thousand, five hundred members. In that time, together with a sister group in California, we have distributed just about fifteen thousand masks throughout our community. Now that the CDC is calling for all to wear facemasks outside of the home, our people are shifting slightly and making masks for their friends and neighbors, while still cranking them out for the first responders and the medical community. All the while, we do not ask about political affiliations. In fact, there is a rule in the group that there is no political discussion allowed. We provide for everyone, regardless of political belief. I also pointed out to Maga-ette that we do all of this for free and do not accept monetary donations.
I concluded by saying that I thought I was doing my part, and asking what she was doing. Her reaction?
Maga-ette instantly had two one sentence responses, which sort of told me she had not really read what I had written. The first told me to stand up, pat myself on the back and give myself an "ada boy" (her spelling, not mine). The second was to tell me I was an "arrogant dem".
Frankly, I am quite proud of what my wife and I have done in the past two weeks. The response from Maga-ette was so asinine I went immediately to my friends page to unfriend her, only to find out she had beat me to it.
And that, in a nutshell shows you how difficult it is to talk to somebody who has made up their minds that they are not going to listen, no matter what you say. In other words, she might as well be the president himself.
