Origin Stories
I met Abram* about seven years ago. We started as colleagues, then quickly bonded over a similar sense of humor, childhood pop culture, as well as a curiosity about humanity, politics, and history. Abram had dark brown eyes that lit up when he talked about anything of interest to him; an infectious smile. He was intelligent, curious, and open minded. Ours was not a romantic love, but--make no mistake--I loved him very much.
Abram's parents settled in the United States legally, as refugees from a country struggling with generations of turmoil and violence. He and his older sister were born in Chicago. His parents brought with them the traditional dress, religion, and diet of their origin country. For Abram and his siblings these different traditions created moments of isolation from peers, ridicule from neighbors, even hateful comments just being out in public.
When I heard these stories I was appalled. I was thankful moments such as these were decades in the past; that we today live in a country much less tolerant of this kind of ignorance. What I failed to realize is the cruelties, the judgments, the bigoted assessments by those who never took the time to get to know Abram or his family... The impact of that wasn't just the past for Abram, as I had naively presumed. It was part of his origin story.
Looking back, the first signs of what was to come started a year or two after Abram and I met. The United States, really the world, was adjusting to an inundation of superficial interactions from social media, news feeds with no fact checking, algorithms feeding individuals whatever they clicked most... Even if it was poison, even if it was untrue, even if it offered only an oversimplified, inflammatory piece of a much more complex story. Echo chambers upon echo chambers upon echo chambers encircling all of us.
When Abram fell into those echo chambers--the vitriol, the conspiracy theories, the poisonous pits constantly putting on display the worst of humanity--, it triggered something in him none of us would have anticipated. He started to become easily enraged, suspicious, quick to look for insidious explanations for everyday events. He started filling his free time with videos/posts/articles about how the only way to correct any of the world's wrongs was violence; that there would be no vindication for anyone "different" until all societal structure was made to collapse.
When I met Abram and through most of the time I knew him, he was well respected, successful by all standards, had strong family bonds, and friends who loved him. His real life experience the last couple of decades... One would have thought it enough to counter the poison the algorithms were feeding him. Yet it wasn't. The smoldering embers of those early interactions ignited in a way none of us could extinguish.
Last time I saw Abram he was leaving to go live on a compound out west with a group of like-minded individuals. They are determined not just to survive any inevitable national disintegration, but to do their part to expedite it. He cut ties with all of us, including his family.
It will be a year this spring since we last saw or heard from Abram. Not long after he left his mother showed me a picture of him when he was around age four. He was smiling, squinting up at the sun bright behind whoever had the camera in hand. I find myself drawn to the image of that little boy, to my memories of the man I knew him to be all those years.
As children death seems the worst kind of loss, yet I have discovered mourning the living a pain much more acute.
Abram was a little boy whose family came to this country legally--same as most of our ancestors--, only to be reminded over and over that he/his family/their traditions did not "fit" ... that they did not "belong" ... that they were "different" and therefore "weird" ... as if the words and dreams written in the blood of this country's Declaration, Revolution and Civil War for some reason did not apply to them.
Absolute BS. But the kind of BS a child cannot always recognize as such before it becomes permanently interwoven into the tapestry of who they are. The repercussions of which will echo from them out to all those who do love them and to all those in the future who will love them.
You have every right to judge the man Abram has become. He is culpable. I make no excuses. I loved our conversations, that vivid curiosity, his fierce intellect. Where we are today, however, leaves no room for grey. The destructive path he has chosen... I am clear it does more than simply put he and I at ideological odds. It make us enemies.
But in the midst of your judgment I also ask you to remember this... at the start of Abram's story was just a bright eyed, curly haired boy as optimistic and open to the world as any child. What if just a few more people had told him something different: that he belonged, that the United States is a place where our differences are our strengths. A few minutes or even seconds of a different message, a more tolerant message... How many lifetimes of pain might that have saved.
*not his real name