This is one that has been waiting to be written since this past spring, just after we arrived in the Cowboy State.
Over the course of the summer, my wife and I have been unfriended by a person on facebook. This is a person who is part of a group we had hung with for several years during the summers, with whom we had attended concerts and shows and we had to the house overnight on more than one occasion. This person had been one of the friends my wife turned to for help when she was hospitalized while I was out of town.
During the course of the pandemic, we had been unable to get to our summer house in the west. We spent a great deal of time dreaming of when we would be able to return and resume our friendships and enjoy the beauty of this great state. After more than a year and a half, we were finally able to come here in May, and have been here ever since. Once we got here, we notified our friends that we were back and looking forward to seeing all.
Then we waited.
And waited.
After about a month, we finally heard from our "friend". We got together for drinks and dinner, and were told, in essence, that we were on the outs with everyone. I am not going to name the "friend" or even identify the "friend" by gender. The plural will be used where otherwise indicating gender is unavoidable.
Our crimes(s)?
For the both of us, it turns out that our joint crime was Stitched Together Long Island, the group we founded together and was run primarily by my wife, that in the earlier days of the pandemic ended up with more than two thousand members on Long Island, and with our sister groups, primarily the original founding group in California run by my sister in law and her daughter, ended up making and distributing approximately five hundred thousand masks to need based groups, first responders and medical organizations that could not gain access to them via ordinary means. As you can guess, our "friend" is anti-mask. We were proudly told how they ripped their mask off the moment they were leaving stores, shooting the bird at the employees inside, to show they are independent and cannot be denied their "rights", whatever those rights are. They will now not go to stores, restaurants, etc. that require masks.
We were also told that the friends all believe that we founded and ran Stitched Together so that we could get publicity. For what, I am at a loss over, but there you go.
Our "friend" is, as you could also guess, anti-vax. Part of our friendship banishment is that we have been vocal in pushing for everyone everywhere to be vaccinated. Our "friend" claims the vaccines are nothing but poison. They cannot tell you what the poison is, but it is poison, by golly!
They also claim the rest of us are being manipulated by false statistics of deaths caused by COVID. The logic here is that a person who dies of cardiac or respiratory arrest has not died of COVID, even if the death certificate states the cardiac or respiratory arrest was caused by the virus. The further logic, if there is any, is that if the cause of death on the death certificate says cardiac or respiratory arrest, then the death was not caused or contributed to by COVID; therefore, it should not be counted as a COVID death, even if it is listed as a causal or contributing factor.
Mind you, our "friend" has taken the vaccine, but only did so when told they would not be allowed to visit grandchildren in another state. In other words, when it suits their purposes, they will inject this "poison" into their system.
My personal crime?
This blog.
You know, the one that has had a total of five entries this entire year prior to this one.
Our "friend" tells us that the entire group is sick of the blog and how I "go on and on". They wish I would just shut up. Mind you, none of the others have told me this, then again, none of the others have said anything to me since our return in May. It appears possible that our "friend" was sent as an emissary to shut me up, or they took it upon themselves with the tacit approval of the rest.
To put this mildly, I am not going to shut up, even if this blog is only published occasionally.
When I pointed out to our "friend" that the tenor of the posts in this blog has not changed at all over the course of the past couple of years while we were in New York, I was told that this is true, but times are now different. There is no longer any tolerance among the friends for the kind of thinking and statements that are made in the blog, even if nothing in the blog is personal, and I try to avoid profanities, for the most part. So, if I want to maintain certain friendships, I should no longer speak my mind on this blog, or anywhere where our "friend" and the rest of the "friends" may either see, hear or read it. My First Amendment rights be damned, but they are still free to tell me what they think.
So I guess we are looking for new friends.
We will probably not look for them in Walgreen's, where just about nobody is wearing masks, and those few who are seated in the waiting area for vaccines of any kind are doing so without masks, right under signs that say anyone seated there must wear one.
We will probably not look for them in a couple of the auto repair shops and a laundromat in town that have hung signs pronouncing their undying MAGA love and "Trump Won!"
We will also probably not look for them from the various folks in the area who drive around or park their vehicles alongside the road festooned with MAGA flags and banners of all sorts, including the red, white and blue flags adorned with that all time great campaign/political slogan "Fuck Biden".
Finally, we will also probably not look for them at the announced "freedom" rally scheduled a couple of towns over from us in the next week or so, in which the speakers are going to be at the VFW railing about their freedoms being taken from them by anyone, especially anyone in the government or a school, who tells them to get vaccinated or wear a mask. Our freedom to be able to go out in public confident that the person standing near us will not infect us with a deadly disease does not enter into the equation.
We will look for these new friends, and we will keep looking for them. They have to be somewhere around here.
Oh, Wyoming...
