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One state, two state, red state, blue state

By
Jonathan Gallardo — Gillette News Record, Sept. 5

It shouldn’t matter where you’re from.

When Gillette’s population boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, people moved here from all over the country. This was where the jobs were. The community went through a lot of growing pains, but it persevered and came out stronger for it. Many of those transplants ended up making Gillette their homes, and quite a few of them invested their lives into making Campbell County a better place.

The city announced this week that it had selected a new police chief. He hails from Alamosa, Colorado. Unsurprisingly, this made a few Facebook users very angry.

If you look closely, you can see the word that made a few people upset: Colorado. Because as we all know, if you’re from Colorado, you’ve got liberal blood running through your veins and blue streaks running through your hair. Oh, wait. That’s not true at all.

Of course, this is the internet, where adults feel comfortable whining and complaining like they’ve reverted back to their nine-year-old selves.

They need to chill out. Don’t they remember that facts don’t care about their feelings? They’re acting like — dare I say it — sensitive little snowflakes.

The political demographic of a state does not dictate the political leanings of any particular person. States like Colorado, California, Oregon and more will draw the ire of Wyoming residents, and I understand why, but that doesn’t mean every single person from those states agrees with how things are run over there.

Josh Allen and Chuck Gray are both from California, yet thousands of Wyomingites love them.

And a handful of the most vocal conservatives in Campbell County hail from dark blue states such as California and New Jersey. They likely moved to Wyoming for its conservative values, not because they wanted to turn it more liberal.

But some people have been brainwashed over the years into believing that a blue wave is coming for Wyoming, and they’ve become conditioned to fear any person with a non-Wyoming license plate.

This is just a hunch, but I bet most of the people complaining about the new police chief being from Colorado also voted three times for a New York City billionaire real estate developer to be our president. I can’t believe they would vote for a guy from one of the bluest states in the country. But I guess that doesn’t count?

What happened to sitting back and watching things play out? Enough with these knee-jerk reactions. The angry internet mob’s fears may be realized, they may not be. No one knows how the new police chief will do, but the least we can do is wait and see.

That’s the reasonable thing to do.

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