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An old friend of mine passed recently. 

When an old friend passes, you can’t replace them with another old friend. You have only a limited number of people who have shared your history, moved through life with you, talked and laughed and pondered the universe and their lives with you. 

It’s these cumulative understandings, the sweetness and depth of long familiarity, that give meaning to old friendships.

I spend most of my days now writing — much of it to you — and when I’m not writing, I’m in meetings with colleagues who are decades younger than I am. 

My old friend’s passing makes me painfully aware of how little time I spend — and how little effort I’ve made — reaching out to old friends. I’ve taken them for granted, as if they’ll always be there. After all, they always have been there. 

But old friendships don’t last forever because neither they nor we last forever. Old friendships have to be appreciated, preserved, and savored when we can. 

Starting today, I'm going to invite them to join me for breakfast or lunch a few times a week. Or if they’re far away (years ago, I left most of my old friends on the East Coast), I’m going to phone them, maybe even FaceTime them, and make it a point to see them when I’m next on the other coast. 

I remember my father telling me that the hardest part about growing old was losing his old friends. 

I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I asked him: “Why can’t you just make new friends?” He explained that he had tried to make new friends, and had succeeded somewhat. But he couldn’t make an old friend, and there was a difference. 

Sometimes it was iron collars designed to make sleep impossible.

That is the part of history many people never learned in school.

These brutal punishment devices were forced onto enslaved Black people for weeks or even months at a time. Heavy iron spikes dug into the body, prevented rest, made field labor unbearable, and turned basic movement into constant pain.

And often, the so-called “crime” was something small:

Trying to escape.

Speaking back.

Resting too long.

Wanting freedom.

Wanting dignity.

Wanting to be treated like a human being.

The cruelty was intentional.

These collars were not only physical punishment — they were psychological warfare meant to break the spirit of enslaved people and remind everyone else what happened when Black humanity challenged the system.

That is why slavery cannot honestly be described as simply “hard labor.”

It was organized terror.

A system built not only on stolen work, but on humiliation, fear, surveillance, and violence repeated so often that society began treating it as normal.

And maybe the most disturbing part is this:

Many of the people who enforced these punishments considered themselves respectable citizens.

Churchgoers.

Politicians.

Businessmen.

Families.

History becomes dangerous when cruelty is cleaned up into softer language.

Because once suffering is hidden behind polite words, future generations stop understanding what people actually survived.

Photographs and recreations like this force us to confront a truth America often struggles to face:

freedom was not handed to Black people peacefully.

It was fought for by generations of people who endured unimaginable brutality and still refused to surrender their humanity.

And somewhere behind every iron collar, every scar, and every punishment was one terrifying idea the system could never fully destroy:

the belief that one day freedom would come anyway.

How many stories of survival were buried simply because the world found the truth too uncomfortable to remember?"

For years, Lindsey Graham was one of Donald Trump's most sickeningly loyal defenders. He became a familiar target for Democrats, late-night comedians and, yes, OD editors who watched in disbelief as the once-independent South Carolina senator transformed himself into a sycophantical toady.

But that's not the way Hunter Biden chose to remember Graham.

After news of of the South Carolina senator's death, Hunter posted a message recalling an earlier version of Graham – one who could battle Democrats on the Senate floor and still count them as friends and share a glass afterward.

The Graham who once said of Hunter’s dad: "If you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, you've got a problem. He's the nicest person I've ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created."

Hunter wrote "That is the Senator Graham I will remember today, not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope."

It was a surprisingly graceful tribute in a political era that almost never rewards grace, and in fact seems to look down on it and deride it.

Hunter didn't conveniently overlook Graham's “Trump years” or ask anyone to forget the countless times Graham defended the indefensible or tied himself in knots explaining away behavior that would have horrified his younger self and his “three amigos” buddies McCain and Joe Lieberman.

Instead, he chose to remember that another Lindsey Graham existed before Trump essentially stole the privately-troubled senator’s soul.

Whether you agreed with Graham or not on policy, it was impossible to miss the change in him after coming under Trump’s evil spell.

Once upon a time, Graham was almost comfortable disagreeing with his own party, when friendships mattered more than news hits, and senators from opposite parties could spend the day tearing each other's arguments apart and still share dinner that night.

That was before Trump's decadent Administration of Fear took hold of the American body politic. The outspoken Graham was just one one, albeit among the most visible, of the victims of the Roy Cohn-influenced rule by humiliation that Trump has wrought.

"I will choose to remember the time before Trump," he wrote. "Because I believe in an America after Trump."

That’s a sentiment that reaches way beyond Lindsey Graham. More than the death of one man, Hunter is mourning a political culture that many Americans, on the left and right alike, suspect may never fully return.

In the middle of this bitterly divided era, he offered a reminder that the people we argue with are often more complicated than the caricatures we create of them.

The Reflecting Pool arrests by Park Police should terrify everyone. The federal government is fabricating accusations out of thin air simply to protect one man from his own embarrassing failure.

There is no sabotage. This is insane.