The Views Expressed are Not Necessarily Those of This Author

Scott Hardie | March 11, 2025
We've all had an experience on social media like this, right?

I worked closely with a guy for six weeks, when he joined a company that I was in the process of leaving and I trained him to take over my projects. We got along fine as coworkers, connected on Facebook, and didn't talk again after I left. More than a decade later, I still see an occasional post from him about the bar that he opened in another city, or admiring the murals in his neighborhood, or just skateboarding around as a hobby. He seems like a quiet, well-adjusted, mellow person, having settled comfortably into middle age like me.

And then, out of the blue, he posted a mean-spirited joke about trans women still being men. And when his friends commented that he was being hurtful, he doubled-down and tripled-down with rhetoric that was increasingly agitated. ("Disgusting freaks who want to rape your daughter in a bathroom" was typical of his statements.)

I unfollowed him because I don't want to see that kind of garbage -- sorry for quoting it here but I wanted to get the point across -- and since then, I've been trying to figure out why this so disappointed me. After all, I barely knew the guy; I wouldn't recognize him if we passed on the street. What should it matter to me if he turned out to be a jerk under the calm surface? And yet, I felt like *I* had failed in some way. Perhaps I had missed some hint of his bigotry along the way, or I still felt like a mentor to him more than a decade after his training, or I just made assumptions about his character because he reminded me of myself in certain ways.

But the basic truth is, that sort of hateful attitude is always around us. The openness with which it is expressed waxes and wanes with the political climate, and certainly we're in a moment of high "freedom to offend" right now, but it's always there. Social media exposes us to the opinions of people with whom we have tangential connections in life, and it's natural that some of those people are going to hold opinions that we find shockingly disagreeable. I think my failure in all of this was forgetting that. Being a white, straight, cisgender man, particularly one who doesn't get out much these days, doesn't exactly expose me to a lot of prejudice.

When someone you sort of know suddenly expresses distasteful opinions like this, how do you react? Do you feel the same twinge of personal failure that I described?