Why It’s Not Safe or Sane to Live in the Blue Part of the U.S. Anymore

I’m not a cryer. I usually have to schedule time a couple times a year to watch The Notebook or some stupid shit like that to force a good cry out of me. Even throughout 2020 the tears wouldn’t come. But they surely did when I walked on Dewey Beach in May of 2021.

It’s not really the crying that we should focus on. It’s what caused me to break down in public that’s more important.

Note to readers: If you moved from a blue area to a red one in the last year or so, I’d like to hear from you in the comments . Where did you move from and to? Why? And did you have any sort of physical or emotional reaction when you left?

Have you ever gone to a place — be it a store or a restaurant or an entire city or country — and immediately sensed that it was bad? That’s what happened when I moved to Providence in January 2020.

Three weeks after I moved into my Airbnb, someone tried to mug me a few blocks my apartment. I was able to fight him off and I screamed like a banshee until he ran away.

Physically and monetarily, I was fine. Emotionally? Not so much. I developed a touch of agoraphobia for about a month following the incident. I was so paranoid every time I left the house, expecting the creep to show up for round two. And since the cops and anyone else I told about it acted like muggings, stabbings, and shootings were just part of Providence life, I didn’t feel like anyone would have my back if something happened again.

Fun fact: It did. Someone followed me for an hour when I went for a walk around the abandoned downtown area that summer. I was able to shake him after running through a crowd at the train station. Then, someone tried to attack me behind my apartment that Christmas Eve. My dog scared that one off.

Someone or something was definitely sending me signals to get the fuck out of Rhode Island that year.

It wasn’t just the inherent violence of the city that was a warning to get out. Gina Raimondo’s daily televised speeches and The Providence Journal’s daily death count reminders were as well.

Before 2020, I never paid much attention to the governors of the states I lived in. I honestly had no idea how much power they had. Or that they could have once they implemented emergency powers for themselves.

I couldn’t help but notice Raimondo, the governor of Rhode Island at the time the pandemic began. She definitely enjoyed her televised briefings and chastising of the Rhode Island population too much.

There was a lot to despise about her. The ego. The condescension. The “knock it off” tagline:

What bothered me most was the callousness with which she cut down peoples’ lives and livelihoods. And she did so by imposing mandates that she clearly didn’t believe in.

This was Raimondo at a BLM protest in June 2020:

She violated the 9 p.m. curfew instilled by the mayor to not only talk to 100 protestors without her mask on, but to hold their hands. This was in direct violation of her own mandate.

What was it she had said to us repeatedly that spring? Thank you GoLocalPro for capturing it:

“If you find yourself in a crowd… you’re doing something wrong.”

She gave us a repeat performance at the Blvck Market boutique on Block Island:

Why did this cause such a stir? In addition to it being the second time she got caught violating her mask mandate, it was a direct contradiction to what she’d advised us not to do. From ABC6 in June:

“We are working really hard to keep Block Island open. There’s a lot of people who want to make a living out there. That means the rest of us have to play our part and please wear our masks.”

In December, she was again caught not wearing a mask. This time it was at a paint and wine night that shouldn’t have been open according to her own mandates:

We had just been told by her not to go out unless it was essential. We also weren’t supposed to gather with anyone outside our household.

Just a week or so before this photo appeared, she said:

“Please Rhode Island, hang in there and follow the rules. We are in a very dangerous spot right now and if you could just rein it in and follow the rules over the next few weeks, it will save lives and make a difference.”

Glad she did her part.

It’s not like I wasn’t seeing other Democratic governors and mayors flagrantly violate their own mandates. But it was a different kind of anger I felt when I saw the woman pushing lockdown after lockdown on us, and decimating local small businesses, repeatedly not wearing a mask. It also made me wonder what she knew about the virus that they weren’t telling us.

After all, it wasn’t just her non-masking that stood out in contrast to the fear everyone was drumming up around the virus.

One of the first things that jumped out at me was that the Twin River casino was allowed to reopen in June.

Now, I grew up in casinos, so I know how germ-infested and unhealthy those places are. Even if they made it a smoke-free environment and put up plastic barriers between gamblers, there’s no fucking way in hell a casino would be safer to spend time in than, say, a state park. And, yet, it took a long time for them to reopen up the parks to us.

That smelled fishy. Especially because Twin River contributed $100,000 to the Democratic Governors Association the year before. I’m sure that had nothing to do with giving the casino a front row spot in the phased reopening plan though.

In August, Rhode Island’s Health Director Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott let us know during one of the daily briefs that at least 10% of the COVID-19 deaths had nothing to do with the virus. While these individuals had a positive COVID test, they died from something else entirely. Like a car crash, suicide, or drug overdose.

We were assured that once they’d identified the erroneously tabulated deaths that they’d update the numbers. I stopped watching the death count in December of that year and never once saw the numbers dip. It also never got addressed again by either Alexander-Scott or Raimondo.

There was also the fiasco surrounding the $1.25 billion in coronavirus relief funds Rhode Island received from the federal government.

The governor took it upon herself to control the funds. While that would’ve been fine if she had actually used that money to provide a steady stream of relief to the businesses her mandates harmed, that of course didn’t happen.

While we never got insight into what she did with the money, we do know what she wantedto do. In May 2020, she spoke with The Hummel Report about the CARES Act funds. She mentioned that, while the funds were not supposed to be used to pay off state budget deficits (of which she had about a half a billion at the time), she hoped Congress would eventually change course on the restriction.

It got so bad that Lt. Governor McKee (who she completely iced out throughout all of this) tried to force her hand in spending the funds where they belonged.

(By the way, this woman is now our Secretary of Commerce.)

This was the petition he launched and that, unsurprisingly, didn’t get enough signatures from Rhode Island residents:

As a small business owner myself, this one struck close to home. I started losing clients left and right that fall. I understood why they were trying to be conservative with their marketing funds and had to drop my writing services. None of us knew what the government had waiting around the corner for us in terms of new restrictions.

While I didn’t seek out any funds for myself, I watched as businesses around my neighborhood struggled all year because the funds weren’t being released or were too difficult to get approved for.

I had no desire to deal with any of it. Plus, the thought of taking out a government loan made me sick to my stomach. So I put my head down, tried to recover my business on my own, and started to hatch a plan for Florida.

This is where we get to the crying part.

I left three weeks before my lease was up in May 2021. I couldn’t stand another minute in Rhode Island.

I shipped out the majority of my belongings, packed up my car, and hit the road with my two pups in tow.

We spent eight days on the road, stopping along the way to see some of my friends and to check out different cities. It was on my two-night stopover in Delaware that the tears began to flow.

Now, I love Delaware. It might not be where I was born or raised, but it’s home to me. So, of course I had to stop there on my way down to freedom-loving Florida. I just hadn’t expected I’d get a taste of freedom so soon. I figured I’d have to at least reach the Carolinas for that.

The pups and I stayed in Dewey Beach. Across the street from our hotel was the dog-friendly beach.

The morning after we got into town, we hit the sand right away. Within a few minutes, an older couple walked right up to me, said hello, and asked about my dogs. This was completely normal behavior in Delaware… I just hadn’t expected it after the “new normal” I experienced the past year.

After they left, I felt something stick in my throat and I started bawling my eyes out. That’s when I realized I hadn’t experienced anything resembling normal in over a year.

I hadn’t seen another human’s face outside of my TV screen for about a year.

People would cross the street any time I happened to walk on the same block as them.

I received dirty looks and snide comments with regards to my non-masking when I took my dogs out for walks.

Friends who lived less than an hour away refused to see me because they were too scared.

I hadn’t had an in-person doctor’s appointment since before the pandemic started.

A Walgreens cashier told me that people who didn’t wear masks should all be shot after berating an old man who hadn’t noticed that his had fallen below his nose.

Friends dismissed me as “crazy” or a “Trumper” any time I questioned what was going on, including the rising price of groceries.

All the while, my anger and suspicion grew as I watched politicians and celebrities disregarding mandates and continuing to live lavish lifestyles. What was worse was that the public continued to fall in line without question and gladly made excuses for the elite as if their hypocrisy was no big deal.

As I wiped away my tears on that Delaware beach in May, I realized how badly my body needed that release.

Even though I had five more days on the road after that, it took a good month or so in Florida to get used to not rushing back inside to grab a mask before leaving home. Or to not automatically look away from people passing my way for fear of being harassed for not masking up or social distancing. Or to actually be able to see inside of thriving establishments instead of window after window boarded up due to businesses closing or hiding away from BLM protestors.

I can’t believe people are still complying with any restrictions or mandates. Nor can I believe how many people willingly call for and accept them, especially when we’ve seen how useless all these measures have been.

But that’s the purpose of this post, I guess. To get to the root of the rot in people’s minds and why so many have been okay with sacrificing their lives and livelihoods for… this.