I have friends everywhere.
It’s what Cassian Andor says when he meets someone new: “I have friends everywhere.”
In the TV show Andor, it’s a password used by people working to resist authoritarianism, to identify themselves to each other.
It’s also true. We have friends everywhere. Let’s talk about that.
I live in Seattle.
I have friends who live in Washington DC.
I have friends who live in Los Angeles.
I have friends who live in Alaska and Oregon, California and Colorado, Ohio and New Jersey, Massachusetts and Montana, New York City and New York state, Utah and Arkansas.
I have friends who work for the Department of Homeland Security in DC. I have friends who work for the National Park Service in Rhode Island. I have friends who work for the National Forests and for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and for the Environmental Protection Agency here in Washington state.
I have friends who are poets, artists, dancers, writers. I have friends who are editors and librarians. I have friends who are massage therapists and nutritionists and nannies. I have friends who are schoolteachers; I have friends who staff operating rooms. I have friends who work for restaurants and rideshare companies, for tech companies and nonprofit organizations. I have friends who study the health of the oceans and the health of Americans. I have friends who study history and philosophy and science and science fiction.
I have friends whose great-grandparents were US citizens and friends whose great-grandparents were kidnapped and brought here and brutally prevented from citizenship. I have friends whose great-great-great-grandparents were here before the US was an idea in anyone’s head. I have friends whose ancestors immigrated to this continent, who built the infrastructure of this nation. I have friends who immigrated here themselves to join in the project of building a better nation.
I have friends who are immigrants with visas and without visas, with citizenship and without citizenship. I have friends whose friends and family members live in Africa, in Asia, across the crossroads of the Mediterranean, in Europe and Australia, in North and Central and South America, and on the islands of Iceland and Taiwan and Hawai’i and Hong Kong.
I have friends who are trans. I have friends who are straight and friends who are queer. I have friends of many genders. I have friends who are Jewish, and Muslim, and Christian, and Baha’i, and atheist and agnostic. I have friends who are disabled.
I have friends who are women—in their teens, in their thirties, in their fifties and sixties and eighties.
I have friends everywhere.
Our friends are everywhere.
Please, let’s remember that.