The Civil War We’re Asking For
I’m not asking for one. I don’t want one. I pray we pull our collective heads out of our collective asses before it happens.
But I fear this may be the only way we learn.
The last time American soil was soaked with American blood, in significant quantities, was 1865. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died on both sides of that conflict. We remember the cause, but not the consequences.
5.3 million soliders died in Germany alone, in World War Two. An estimated 60 million people perished world-wide. Of those, only 418,000 deaths were Americans, almost all overseas. Other nations of the world have good reason to avoid war at all costs, because they remember what those costs are. China lost 16 million civilians in WWII, Russia 14 million. Entire nations were reduced to rubble. The citizens of many nations were occupied, terrorized, starved, bombed, and killed.
The United States has not truly suffered from war for over 150 years. We’ve sent plenty of young men and women to die on foreign soil and on the high seas since then. We’ve sacrificed some blood and lots of treasure. But American civilians, in the continental US, have been largely unaffected, including during the World Wars. Our cities have remained intact, our factories productive, our farms fertile. We did not fear for our children’s lives. We did not fear for safety in our homes. Our wars were fought “over there.”
The closest we’ve come was 9/11/01, in two cities, on one day.
Now, in the 21st century, we’re indulging ourselves in polarization, in demonization, in conspiracy theories, in tearing down our institutions, and breaking the bonds of social trust. We’re dividing ourselves, not on matters of policy or difference of opinion, but on questions of loyalty and faith and identity. We rarely compromise. We’re making enemies of our brothers and sisters. Some are openly wishing for violence, destruction, and dissolution.
I fear—that the only way we’ll mature as a nation, as a people, is to go through the fire. Tear ourselves apart, be forced to pick sides, kill and cripple each other. Live in terror of our neighbors and anxiety over our next meal. Watch all we’ve built turned to rubble and ruin. Watch our young people go off with fanatical zeal and return with shell-shocked eyes and missing limbs.
Or not return at all, but be listed “Missing in Action” on some godforsaken battlefield, not in Viet Nam or Korea or Afghanistan, but in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Arizona.
Will it be worth it? To rid ourselves of the illegals, the SJWs, the socialists, and the elites? To abolish the police, the corporations, the fundamentalists, and Trump? Will it be worth spilling blood—not their blood—your blood, your family’s blood? Worth ending this grand experiment in self-governance begun over 244 years ago?
Or can we stop before this gets out of hand? Can we learn to listen to each other with humility and empathy? Can we work out our differences with a sense of common purpose?
Or are we too far gone?
I honestly don’t know. I’m taking it a day at a time while 2020 creeps on toward God-knows-what end.
If this gets ugly, it won’t be good, even if it ends well.
Be kind to each other. Please.
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
— William Tecumseh Sherman
