Wednesday, February 9, 2022

“Old Friends and New Disappointments”


            The responses of various friends to national and world events have left me disillusioned. Did I ever know the true spirit of woman who sits in mass daily and yet defends the attack on the Capitol? Did I misjudge the friend who insists her right to refuse to mask and vaccinate during this pandemic outweighs my rights to stay healthy? Did I naively trust the man who now insists he must own and display an AR-15 when I visit?

            Have these people always been so different from my vision of them, and have they donned masks throughout our years of friendship? Or have they changed without my noticing? Can these relationships recover, or will these disappointments color our interactions from now on?

            Already, there’s less contact initiated by these friends towards me because I know the insurrection at the Capitol endangers our democracy even as those supporters of our former president defend The Big Lie more than a year later. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated for COVID-19, wear masks, and social distance because it’s the moral choice for not just our country, but for the world. I cannot “un-see” the photographs of my friends and family arming for a war that they aspire to begin.

 




Copyright 2022 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman

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