Like many people my age, I enjoyed Facebook. It was a convenient way to stay in touch with people from different chapters of my life and sometimes a good creative outlet. But about three years ago I got the Facebook death penalty.

When Facebook sentences you to death, Facebook doesn’t give you an explanation. One day you just try to login and Facebook’s computers tell you that Facebook has executed you. That’s that. You can’t actually talk to a human being about it. You can appeal to the Facebook computer’s supervisory computer, but that’s it. I’m pretty certain that no appeal of the Facebook death penalty has ever been successful.

Now, I’ll admit I posted some off-color memes in a private group from time to time. And I received a few short-term bans as a result. But I once posted an anti-Nazi meme that had a swastika in it, and Facebook’s computer determined I was guilty of hate speech and banned me for thirty days. Sometimes when Facebook decides you have accumulated too many short-term bans, Facebook’s computers decide to execute you. No trial, no jury, just execution.

But the real reason I think Facebook’s computers banned me is because I started a Facebook page for the Consulate of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Nederland.

It all started when my brother, Roy Jhciacb Cohen, and I were in my Nederland office in 2009 preparing to depart for our annual “Mancation” the next day. Mancation was an event where we would gather with male friends at a bunkhouse on the Niobrara River along the Nebraska / South Dakota border. We would tube down the river and sit around the fire at night drinking and singing songs. (We had some great musicians in our group, and one year a certain someone that many of you would know required us to bring an extra vehicle so we could have a bass, mandolin, and banjo around the fire, as well as the usual guitars).

Anyhow, my brother and I decided it would be a gesture of good will to invite North Korean leader Kim-Jong Il to attend our next Mancation. Through the magic of technology, we located an address for the North Korean consulate in Beijing, and on our way out of town the next day we deposited our invite in the U.S. mail with sufficient postage. Now, we’ll never know what happened to that letter. Most likely someone at the NSA got a good laugh out of it and tossed it in the trash. But maybe it ended up in North Korea and our names were placed on the “shoot immediately” list. If our names were not placed on that list then, I’m certain, because of the events described below, that my name is now on that list.

When we returned from Mancation, I made up a story about how the North Korean dictator had written us back and that we had become pen-pals. Every few months I would post something about my most recent correspondence with the Dear Leader. The next spring, I posted that Kim-Jong Il had invited us to hold our next Mancation in North Korea.

`And then I posted a photo of our group at our bunkhouse in North Korea. And then I posted that the North Korean dictator had asked me to do a bit of legal work for his country in the U.S. And then I posted that he had named me his country’s Consul General in the U.S. I liked this idea because it offered me diplomatic immunity. I even had cards printed. (The Korean letters say, “Go Broncos!”).

Well, I decided, the “Consulate” should have its own Facebook page. So, I created one. And before too long, the Consulate had more than three hundred followers from more than thirty countries around the world. One man even wrote me with a plan to bring peace to Korean peninsula and asked me to forward it to Kim Jong-Un.

Whenever I was at an airport I would check-in on Facebook and indicate I was on my way to Pyongyang for discussions with my boss. Performance reviews in North Korea are always tense.

Kim Jong-Il died in 2011, but I kept my North Korean schtick going up until 2020. I even posted that I had been admitted to practice law in North Korea. It was great fun, at least for me.

One day I tried to login to my Facebook account and learned that Facebook’s computers had sentenced me to death for “violating community standards.”

But receiving the Facebook death penalty turned out to be a good thing. By this time, Trump was in office and I was tired of seeing whatever his cult followers had to say anyhow. I challenged Zuckerberg to a fight, but that letter probably ended up in the trash just as our letter to Kim Jong-Il had many years earlier.

Without Facebook, my blood pressure became lower and I enjoyed a greater appreciation for more important things in life. Like posting memes on Instagram.