{"id":24610,"date":"2019-09-13T11:21:13","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T18:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24610"},"modified":"2024-11-30T06:37:27","modified_gmt":"2024-11-30T13:37:27","slug":"friday-bag-o-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24610","title":{"rendered":"Friday (the 13th) Bag o’ Friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fullsizeoutput_41f3\"<\/a>I\u00a0pop for a high-dollar iPhone so I’ll always have a good camera handy when Mister B nods off with his tongue hanging out, and\u00a0mere weeks later Apple\u00a0announces\u00a0a new model featuring a better camera. Well, I hung onto my old iPhone 6s\u00a0 … which I must admit had a perfectly adequate camera … for a long time, and expect to keep the\u00a0one I have now\u00a0longer yet (I’d better, as much as it cost).\u00a0\u00a0Who needs a wide-angle lens on\u00a0a cell phone camera anyway?<\/p>\n

I do!<\/p>\n

Shut up, no you don’t!<\/p>\n

While\u00a0writing the previous post on Air Force uniforms<\/a><\/strong>, I realized my blog\u00a0needed\u00a0a new post category. I’m calling it “scrapbooking<\/a><\/strong>,” a category for my compulsive cataloging fetish: posts about cars Donna and I have owned, airplanes I’ve flown, and the like. When I check the blog stats, these posts stand out as popular ones, not just with regular readers but also stray visitors. Now you can find them, grouped together, with a single click.<\/p>\n

I ordered a new motorcycle battery from Amazon\u00a0three years ago and wound up getting two. They billed me for\u00a0both … apparently I accidentally clicked twice … but after I straightened things out with customer service they let me keep the second battery. Since I’m planning an October cross-country ride through Arizona and parts of Utah, Nevada, and California,\u00a0I decided to put the\u00a0second, still new\u00a0battery in the Goldwing. I’d hate to be halfway between Flagstaff and Cedar City and have the\u00a0old battery crap out. The new one’s on the charger now;\u00a0when I finish this post\u00a0I’ll swap it out with the old one.<\/p>\n

\n

Social media friendships are easy to break. Real life ones are a little tougher. I’m kind of in\u00a0a no-man’s-land between\u00a0the two with\u00a0my latest breakup. I met this woman at a hash once. We had a lot in common, liked one another, and have since stayed in touch with messages, first by email and\u00a0later via Facebook. But since the 2016 election her public\u00a0Facebook posts, the ones she shares with everyone, have\u00a0exposed a distinctly MAGA-esque worldview. I didn’t see it in her\u00a0direct correspondence with me, though, and decided to let it slide. But then her views began to creep into our private exchanges. She recently asked me what I thought of Sean Hannity, and I jokingly replied that I\u00a0reject anyone who says “Democrat Party.” Except I wasn’t really joking.<\/p>\n

She replied with a long and entirely specious diatribe defending the use of, you guessed it, “Democrat Party.” I unfriended her and don’t plan to communicate with her again. She may, and likely does, think it’s over that, but it’s not. It’s over a public message she posted a month ago, wherein she expressed what she described as deeply-held personal beliefs, one of which was “it’s okay to be white.”<\/p>\n

Who says that? White supremacists, that’s who. It’s okay to be whoever and whatever you are, including white, but it’s not okay to say “it’s okay to be white.” Those are code words used by the alt-right. Saying “it’s okay to be white” is the equivalent of waving an All Lives Matter sign at a Black Lives Matter demonstration: your meaning is clear to everyone.\u00a0I knew I had to break\u00a0our friendship off the day she posted that, but I waffled until last week. You know how I feel about racism. I’ve\u00a0ended several social media friendships over it, and a few real life friendships as well. I feel\u00a0bad for a New York minute, and\u00a0then I’m fine again. Better, in fact, because there’s one less racist in my life.<\/p>\n

Don’t say shit like that, white friends. It exposes you. And if you say it anyway, we can’t be friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s okay to be whoever and whatever you are, including white, but it’s not okay to say “it’s okay to be white.” Those are code words used by the alt-right. Saying “it’s okay to be white” is the equivalent of waving an All Lives Matter sign at a Black Lives Matter demonstration: your meaning is clear to everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,40,250,4,5,2,827],"tags":[2883,2881,2880,2879,436,2882,2617,69],"class_list":["post-24610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrivia","category-critters","category-culture-wars","category-hash-house-harriers","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-social-media","tag-democrat-party","tag-batteries","tag-cataloging-fetish","tag-cell-phone-camera","tag-dachshund","tag-friending-and-unfriending","tag-moto-maintenance","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24610"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35759,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24610\/revisions\/35759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}