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Jeff Whitten: Getting all ‘furrious’
editor's notes

What’s a furry, you ask.

That’s easy. I am planning on turning into one if my wife lets me. Once she gives me the go ahead, I will then self identify as a kangaroo, maybe, or an anteater.

Or a polar bear.

A nice polar bear, of course. One that wears suspenders and patches on his sleeves and smokes a pipe and lives in a treehouse. He doesn’t eat seals or walruses because they might be a neighbor who also decided to turn furry. It’ll have its advantages.

Boss: “Hey, Whitten, how come you didn’t come to work today?”

Me: “I can’t drive today. I’m a polar bear.

Polar bears work remote so we don’t scare anybody. You know, grrrr.”

Boss: “Good thinking.”

So what’s a furry, you ask again.

A furry is a person who “has an active interest in animal characters with human characteristics,” according to the internet, which goes on to say the person takes on a “fursona” and interacts with other furries.

Hot dog, I say. Sounds like a plan.

Wait, is a hot dog a furry? I don’t know.

Most of the time they’re either grilled, boiled or zapped in the microwave.

Anyway, for a while it looked like America’s public schools were becoming overrun with furries. Even here in the world’s greatest and fastest growing county, mind you, where people move here for the schools and then get mad because they have to sit in car lines.

Look, I myself heard from multiple concerned sources insisting there is a child at one school who insists upon being identified as a cat and has been provided with a litter box, etc. Now please understand I have not seen this with my own eyes and have merely been told it’s so, which obviously means it must be true stuff – and anyone who says otherwise is hiding something and an election stealing liberal.

(Funny, when gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams questioned her loss in the last election, she was derided as a sore loser by Republicans. When the shoe is on the other foot last election, the losing team – i.e., Republicans –

claim their candidate lost because the election was stolen.)

Anyway, I asked the superintendent if the local school system was in the business of supplying litterboxes to students who thought they were cats, and was told no. Not here.

What’s more, an Associated Press piece that came out Wednesday morning reported that a Nebraska state senator apologized Monday “after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litterboxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self identify as cats.” Read on: “Sen. Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule.

“Bostelman initially said he was ‘shocked’ when he heard stories that children were dressing as cats and dogs while at school, with claims that schools were accommodating them with litter boxes.

“‘They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,’ Bostelman said during legislative debate. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?’” Good question, Sen. Bostelman.

Except see that word “debunked.” That means it ain’t happening, despite myriad outraged claims made in Facebook groups all over the U.S. that it is too happening because, well, maybe because we’ve seen grownup Georgia fans running around barking like dogs. Woof, woof, they say, hunker down, etc.

Sure, Georgia Bulldogs are reported to be hairy as they hunker, not furry, but that’s being nitpicky. If so-called adults are self-identifying as beer-swilling bulldogs, that doesn’t set much of an example for kids, does it, nor, now that I think about it, do the billions of drivers on I-95 who speed bumper-to-bumper to the next mile marker while self-identifying themselves as herds of lemmings.

And what about the donkeys who symbolize the Democratic party, or their elephant counterparts, the Republicans. Or John Lennon, who sang he was not just a walrus, but THE walrus, or was it McCartney? I don’t know. They were hippies.

But it doesn’t totally surprise me folks want to be identified as furries. I’m not even sure I blame them, given our track record as humans.

Moo.

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