Adolescence

A few days ago, I unfollowed my childhood best friend on instagram after he started posting videos of him firing an AR-15 in a shooting range while dawning a “Fund The NRA” t-shirt. I spent 13 years of schooling together with this guy, 8 of which we were close enough to be hanging out on a regular basis. I haven’t talked to him for over 5 years. I keep thinking about how we ended up as such different people. We both had the exact same schooling experience, we lived 2 blocks away from each other, and our parents are still friends to this day. I’m assuming we both started to be bombarded with right wing political messaging around the same age (end of middle school, beginning of high school). We both fell slowly down the right wing pipeline in tandem. I happened to crawl my way out, but he never did.  And mind you, this was in a time where the internet wasn’t even a big part of our lives until 8th grade. I can’t even fathom how much worse it has gotten, and how many more men will slip and fall until they’re no longer victims but perpetrators. Sad.