A guest story from Nick Carraway —

“Everyone that knows me knows I had a falling out with Tom Buchanon. He was one of my friends in school, but as luck should have it, I really didn’t know him as well as I thought I did. Sometimes I never know a guy as much as you think you do. The same thing happened again this week.

A friend I went to high school with and drove to school every day has become radicalized. He was apparently spouting off about this whole election is a coup on the Facebook. Facebook doesn’t take kindly to folks that are potentially inciting violence based on false information. They took the post down. He has decided to quit Facebook.

He sent me a “breakup letter” after one of my posts on my personal blog site. He had asked me to share my posts with him just a few weeks earlier. I always knew he was conservative, but he was one of the reasonable ones. At least, that’s what I thought. One of us has gone clear around the bin. At the moment, I suspect it’s him, but who knows.

A large part of my ethics requires me to admit that I can be wrong. No one has a monopoly on the truth. However, we split based on the fact that he internalized my criticism of the Trump truckers that ran the Biden bus off the road and the various right-wing groups sewing discontent at protests by fomenting violence and then letting Antifa and Black Lives Matter take the blame.

What was so disjarring was the fact that he took it as a personal attack. It’s one thing to buy into the narrative that the protests have been violent because of the protesters. I get that on some level. I still don’t get the personal affront of calling out people that planned the kidnapping of a sitting governor. Why is he internalizing this? Why does he feel the need to defend this on such a level?

I’m not mad. I’m sad. I’m overwhelmed with grief. While we haven’t seen each other in years we had stayed connected online off and on throughout the past 15 years. It’s a rhetorical question that will eat away at me for quite a while. What in the hell happened to him? I left him my contact info and put the ball in his court. It will be up to him.

I tell this story because I suspect many of you have a similar story to tell. It’s one of the curses of social media. As John Oliver said in passing, “gee, it’s too bad about Larry. I guess he sucks now.” We stay connected only to find someone we thought we knew so well Is gone. Mourning someone that is truly gone is hard enough. Mourning the loss of a friendship stings that much more.”