dear_friends unhinged 'i wonder what my old reardan friends think of me. i would guess they are proud of my success and chagrined and unsurprised by my continuing liberalism. i wonder if any of them thought about me when they voted for trump. i wonder if they remember how much they loved and were loved by me. i wonder if they know they've helped place me, a public-figure brown-skinned liberal, in danger. how much of that danger is real? i don't know. i am getting death threats. but i am more afraid of the quieter forms of right-wing anger and sociopathy that have found power with donald trump's election. i never directly feared for my life and career during a republican presidency until trump won office. i have never felt so scared for the peace and safety of the entire world. and i fear that reardan, the place where ei was so loved and accepted and celebrated is now just another little white town that i, in the name of personal and professional safety, might need to avoid. dear reardan, i am afraid of you. does that make you sad? or angry at me? dear reardan, dear old friends, dear old lovers, do you realist that when you voted for trump, you voted against me - against he memory of the person i used to be in your lives? i was the indigenous immigrant, the first generation of my family to ever fully commit himself to the world outside of the reservation. i was the eccentric brown boy. i was the indigenous leftist. and for five years in the 1980s i was a transformative figure. i made that little white town into a slightly more diverse and inclusive and accepting place. or maybe i didn't do any of that. maybe i was just a cultural anomaly. and though many natives - many spokanes - have attended reardan since i graduated and have maintained friendships and marriages with white people, i wonder if all of that is superficial. i wonder if my friendships in reardan have always been superficial. maybe i was loved only because of the ways in which i was not seen as typically and stereotypically native. maybe i was loved only in part. maybe i was celebrated only in proportion to the positive press i brought to the town and school. and maybe in this trump era i would now be ostracized and vilified in reardan for being who i have always been.' - sherman alexie 171001 what's it to you? who go blather from