When thinking of politics I often think of analogies. One of the things I noticed on my cruise was that there were a lot of jackasses on the cruise. They were rude to the staff. They were abusive to employees and people on shore. They were every description of the ugly American you could think of.  I have no idea if they were conservative or liberal. It would make life easier to assume they were conservative, but I have no way of verifying that.

In looking at the lyrics for Jason Aldean’s song “Try that in a Small Town” you can see the subtle nods towards racism. When looking at the video you can’t avoid the subtle nods for racism. Left vs. Right is the main fault line everyone focuses on, but big town vs. small town is another fault line. There are others. Honest vs. Dishonest. Asshole vs, Kind. Narcissist vs. Empathetic. America has always been a collection fault lines and separations. Essentially we have made it through by standing with people we have common cause with even if we have other areas where we disagree. As much as the overt racism and sexism bothers me, there was something else I noticed immediately.

“Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like.”

I hate to be the “nobody is talking about” guy, but there is an image inherent here about big city life. I’m sure this is what people in small towns believe. It’s only been shoved down their throats for decades. Hell, the 2017 inaugural address was titled “American Carnage”. It was offensive on any number of levels, but more offensive to me as a writer. It was like a sixth grade thought experiment where the winner got his/her dystopian essay read on national television.

The biggest fault line dividing America today is fact vs. fiction. Aldean is telling a terrific story here. You could probably picture Gotham from all of those Batman movies where everyone was afraid to go outside and crime was just around the corner. SNL had a sketch years ago where they talked about someone in New York getting mugged every thirty seconds. So, they just made it the same guy. Chicago, Portland, New York, and Los Angeles are all billed as hell on earth. Yet, crime statistics per capita would tell you that they are statistically more safe than traditional red areas.

Where does this fiction get us? Well, it gets a huge divide in our politics as rural areas vote red and urban areas vote blue. Since our constitution skews towards real estate and not people it means that these small towns are over represented in Austin, Washington, or your own state. Add in a little gerrymandering and the story keeps perpetuating itself. Only criminals and dead beats live in the city. Good people live in small towns. This isn’t left vs. right anymore. It is fiction vs. non-fiction. Certainly the picture they paint of big city life is frightening, but it is about as true as a dystopian novel.

We are a citizenry that seems to live and die by our Google searches. A quick Google search on civil war demonstrates that numerous people are thinking about it. Truth be told though, those fault lines have always been there. Conflicts have always been a part of our culture. You can identify historical periods based on where those conflicts arise.

You do that because you know full well that some of the conflicts we currently have weren’t major considerations before. LGTBQ+ rights have always been important, but those battles weren’t fought 20 and 30 years ago when my generation came of age. People always have worried about illegal immigration and undocumented peoples, but it could hardly be called a crisis back in those days.

Sometimes things happen to make these conflicts front and center. Sometimes their rights and needs evolve to the point where a conflict is unavoidable. Sometimes whoever they is decides it is time to break out of the shadows. Sometimes new issues arise that have to be addressed. This is a natural part of history that can’t be avoided.

The usual course of these things is that those other issues that were being debated suddenly aren’t anymore. The battles of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to other battles in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, new issues arose in the 1990s and 2000s. One or two issues came forward and those others naturally took a backseat. It’s not that they became less important or solved necessarily, but we seemingly made enough progress to at least set it aside for awhile.

If we were to characterize this age we would say that everyone has picked sides on everything and everything is a burgeoning crisis. Obviously women’s rights have become front and center as it pertains to the roll back of abortion rights. We still see African Americans and other minority groups still concerned deeply about policing and how suspects get treated. The LGTBQ+ community is still battling for recognition of their rights and what that looks like in different situations. Then, we have all the folks standing on one side or the other in the fight over income inequality.

The last part is part of the change. We seemingly stand on one side or another on all of these issues. The usual course is that for most of these issues we are standing on the sidelines. It’s not that we don’t care, but that it doesn’t directly impact us. We might consider ourselves allies to one side or another, but it really isn’t our fight. Now, we seem to fight about everything.

If one of us is being held back on these fronts then we all are being held back. If black lives matter then all lives matter. If women get autonomy over their own bodies then we all do. If transgender people get to feel safe in their chosen identities then we all do. So, supporting the fight on the side you believe pushes us all forward. Either it pushes us forward or keeps us from running headlong over the cliff.

All that being said, people need a break from fighting all the time. Not everything can be a battle. Something must unite us. Something must make us come together to acknowledge our shared humanity. Perhaps the worst sign of a coming civil war is the fact that more and more of these events are simply becoming another battle.

The pandemic might be the single defining event of this generation. It has become the “where were you when” moment. It is this generation’s Kennedy assassination. It is this generation’s Challenger explosion or fall of the Berlin Wall. It is this generation’s 9/11. Yet, the defining characteristic won’t be solidarity. It won’t be people coming together to defeat a faceless enemy. It won’t be people coming together at all. It will be yet another fault line drawn by forces not our own. Those forces aren’t us, but they are us at the same time. If you understand that contradiction then you are doing a whole lot better than me.

“The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.”– Stephen Marche

Today’s quote comes from the jacket in Stephen Marche’s new book. I hate to spoil everyone’s fun. I haven’t read it yet. The topic seems interesting enough, but I have a backlog of books on my nightstand that I got for Christmas and I haven’t broken into those yet.

Marche is a Canadian. He can certainly opine from a safe distance about the coming destruction of America. My sense is that this is somewhat similar to the collective works of Karl Marx. Everyone is familiar with his “Communist Manifesto”, but I was thinking more along the lines of Das Kapital. It was always my understanding that he felt the revolution was what would be and not necessarily what should be.

What he did not see is that other forces would rise up to prevent the inevitable revolution between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Unions and progressive politicians prevented his revolution and brought the change needed through more peaceful means. We certainly can hope that something or someone intervenes before we go down that road.

Of course, the tag line above is what Simon and Schuster sees as the money line. There is no official definition in literature for the money line. English teachers may call it a theme statement or the main idea. It is the one line people remember. I don’t need to know how this will happen. There are any number of ways it can happen. The real question is who would be involved in such a civil war. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fit so nicely into a tag line we can use to sell thousands of books.

Our last civil war was the north versus the south. That seemed easy enough. The battle lines were fought over slavery, but what is so fascinating from 64,000 feet is seeing how people have tried to distort and deflect that over the intervening decades and century. Slavery became “states rights.” A simple fight over the “right” to own other people turned into some high-minded affair over the exact understanding of federalism.

So, where are the fault lines in this coming civil war? I suppose geography could come into play. Cities and rural areas seem to vote radically differently these days. However, the fault lines don’t seem to be fraying on those lines alone. It could be right versus left. That would make a lot of sense as the political parties seem to be moving further and further away from each other.

Yet, when compared internationally, the parties are not nearly as far apart as we are led to believe. Plus, there are examples that the difference in parties is not necessarily the only thing to consider. Sometimes there are coalitions between the parties that can be a positive or negative force. At any rate, preventing a civil war can be daunting when we can’t identify where the fault lines actually are.

It isn’t as easy as vaccine versus not vaccine. It isn’t as easy as racist versus not racist. It isn’t as easy as progressive versus conservative. It’s not as easy as fact versus fiction. However, there are commonalities between all of those things. At the end of the day we could simply label one side as individualistic and the other side of pluralistic. Yet, even those terms are not absolutely precise. Labeling one side as selfish and the other as selfless is a little self-serving. It might be just that easy. Either way, the who is far more fascinating than the what.