re: #399 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

The Western Nebraska Observer (Kimball’s newspaper) did a recent article about a woman who when she and her brother were teenagers, her brother (a high school football player) contracted polio and died from it.

That was written up at the time in the Sidney Telegraph, and immediately the whole family was shunned. They got death threats. People threatened to burn down their home. Merchants refused to do business with them. They moved away to Colorado where people didn’t know them.

The Western Nebraska Observer spent weeks tracking her down from the old Sidney paper’s articles about them at the time so they could get her take on Covid-19 and how stigma is playing out now.

Stigma is real (as every disabled person or atheist can tell you).

That’s heartbreaking. I hate people.