If you’re like me, you’ve been wondering if it’s possible for America to have another civil war. On the surface, it seems unlikely. The leftists running California and New York, and their supporters in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street and in Hollywood, aren’t too likely to form standing armies and invade, say, Oklahoma or Alabama, any time soon. It’s truly hard for me to imagine any of the Democrats and leftists I have met taking part in such a crusade now, or ever.
But if you broaden the definition of civil war to its actual meaning, the awful reality is that we might already be there.
Hayley Geftman-Gold, a vice president in the strategic transactions department at CBS, wrote that she was not sympathetic to the victims of the shooting in Las Vegas — in which at least 58 people were killed and more than 500 were injured — because, she said, country music fans are often Republicans and own guns. Granted, she was reportedly fired immediately. But the point is she felt comfortable saying this. And how many anti-Trump Americans are not quietly cheering her on in the privacy of their homes this evening? Is America truly at peace with itself?
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines a civil war as “a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country”. Oxford’s online dictionary likewise defines civil war as “a war between citizens of the same country”.
It might not be obvious, like it was with the Confederacy versus the United States. But Americans increasingly are turning on one another. It starts with the silent treatment of someone you know who voted for Donald Trump, or tweeting that Republican country music listeners deserve to be shot, and it ends with the massacre in Las Vegas.
As I post this, we don’t yet know if the brutal and bloody slaughter in Las Vegas was the doing of a left-wing terrorist taking aim at likely Trump supporters, or the actions of yet another Muslim-inspired vendetta against Western culture and liberty. Regardless, Americans increasingly are turning on each other. They don’t need to take up arms. They have the more extreme version of their own viewpoints manifested in these various groups to do it for them.
It’s even the case with Islamic terrorism. You would think that Americans might at least have united against Islamofascism the way they united against Nazi Germany when a similar war was waged against individualism and freedom in an earlier era. Not so much. Americans are not even in agreement on whether it’s acceptable and proper to call Islamic terrorism what Islamic terrorists want it to be called — Islamic jihad. Some on the left (most of them hardened atheists or agnostics, ironically enough) think it should be illegal to even question Islam. Social media companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter have made it their business to quash all the nonleftist, dissenting opinion they can, taking particular aim at critics of Islam such as Pamela Geller, who tries to rescue young Muslim women from the male chauvenists enveloping their lives. Should Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg ever find his way into the presidency, we can expect similar policies coming not just from Facebook but from the entire federal government. (Ditto with Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat as President.)
The issue is getting wider than Islam vs. America, assuming the Las Vegas massacre even was about Islam (and as yet there’s little evidence that it was). The issue, it increasingly seems to me, is Americans versus Americans. Think about it. Muslims and other raging terrorist groups — whether Antifa on the left or the Neo-Nazis on the right — only exploit the divisions and sore feelings dividing our country. Let’s be honest. Even if you support Donald Trump, he’s not going to unite us. But neither could Hillary Clinton. Nor will the next horror show the Democrats produce — even in the unlikely event it’s the smiling, painfully moronic Joe Biden.
Nobody can bring us together because we’re not together. Unless or until we find our common thread, I don’t know how this resolves itself. Politically and culturally, it seems like that common thread could and might be liberty, individualism and individual rights. But the mere mention of any of those things gets you called a racist by those who disagree on matters such as the tax rate, defense spending levels or whether the Iran deal was a good idea.
It’s not my intention to be gloomy. But if we’re ever to resolve our problems, we’ve got to start naming them aloud.
Sooner or later, the issue will resolve itself because it has to do so. The Civil War in America of the 19th century did not resolve everything. It took generations to get from Reconstruction in the 1860s to the repeal of the Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s. Even then there was not utopia, but most of the problems ended soon after. One way or another, America will resolve and get through the current crisis. The question is how, when — and with how much more bloodshed.
Rest in peace, victims of Las Vegas. It’s our problem now.
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