An Uncivil War

PRECEDENT

We have been attacked by an unseen enemy – a climate driven pandemic – which has killed and sickened millions, changed the way people work and even think about work, emptied cities, jacked up prices for everything and in a capitalism run amok, driven us into an unending inflation.

In these very same years, our population continues to diversify driven by increasing, essentially uncontrolled immigration caused by countries which have become unlivable and our national political environment so broken that it cannot design and approve a sensible, coherent immigration policy fair to ourselves and to those who want to be part of us.

In addition, the public murder of George Floyd was so deeply affecting to millions across America that it inspired a number of activities that seemed so promising for a country which has continuously faced issues of racism. that appear buried within our very essence.

But here too many of those activities turned out to be hollow or even destructive and most certainly a disappointment as they increased the problems rather than solved them. The House of Representatives will be led by Republicans as the result of five wins in New York State – the result of those failed policies.

The speed and magnitude of these changes have increased negative images within the country…images magnified by the enormous impact of technology – social media – enlarging concerns beyond reality to a public unable to differentiate between truth and lies.

Add to this series of combustible realities is a national government in which the very meaning and activities of our two major political parties are so misshapen and distorted that all we are left with are two colors and the images of an elephant and an ass.

It is easy to believe that nothing like this has ever happened in America before.

But it has.

175 years ago we were younger, smaller, more innocent, neither rich nor powerful and certainly less experienced…but deeply, deeply troubled.

For those who believe that life is a circle it is easy to understand. What we are experiencing now. We have experienced before.

We were challenged, stunned, almost overwhelmed by the very same problems: then, racial slavery which underpinned our economy, the movement of colonial populations from East to West; changing economies from agricultural to business, corporate and industrial and all of it laced with uncertainty that always breeds fear. And when fear exists, especially based on ignorance, hate follows closely and grows in severity.

The divisions within that America broke us apart: the North vs the South. America’s Civil War. The most cruel and damaging war this nation has ever fought.

A war and a conclusion we were certain would put our problems to rest.

But it didn’t.

We can see the parallels if we just look and can imagine a very similar breakage today: the North vs the South, America’s second Civil War

THREATS

It is difficult to know how the American public truly feels about the activities of January 6th, about the chaos and violence on the steps and the actual breaking into the Capitol Building.

The House hearings this Summer were watched by millions. There were, as always, politics involved but what we saw we saw.

Were the activities of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, dressed in battle fatigues and carrying Confederate flags and other symbols of the South, enough to pose a continuous threat to our democracy?

Are we again dealing with a matter of States rights giving States the power to act on their own in overriding a national election?

Have the results of the midterm elections protected that democracy from the election deniers and the endless claims that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen and that Republican State Governors and special election committees will never let that happen again?

Will the Supreme Court intervene and support the idea that States can control Federal elections? There is a case before them now and the three most conservative members are certainly for such a result while the three liberals are not. Kavanaugh, Barrett and the Chief Justice hold the balance.

When will our government come together to deal with the immigration problems that grow and grow at our Southern border? We have written about the changes from European whites to Central American people of color. Now South Americans are running from right wing governments that make living there impossible for people just trying to have a decent life.

Texas might like to keep sending Venezuelan immigrants to New York but nothing is stopping the fact that in just a few years there will be more people of color in Texas than whites.

So as we contemplate the parallels between the reasons for another Civil War, let’s finally talk about racism.

Herschel Walker, a great college football player once upon a time was anointed by Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for the Senate from Georgia.

Walker, with neither the education nor life experience to be a US Senator, received One million seven hundred thousand votes in a losing cause to the sitting Senator, Raphael Warnock.

1,700,000 votes overwhelmingly from white Georgians supporting the Republican cause. Was this an extraordinary example of the end of racism in America?

No. Sadly it was just the opposite.

It was instead a perfect example of this reality: that for centuries black men have played a specific role in entertaining the needs of white power in order to live another day.

And nowhere has this been a fact in such activities as sports and entertainment.

Call it Uncle Tom: Steppin Fetchit. Bojangles. Sammy Davis, Jr. in another era.

Call it tokenism. Give black athletes a chance at a college education if they can play ball and bring in millions of dollars to a university. They don’t even have to go to class.

Call it the ingratitude of white power to the genuinely human needs of other human beings.

Or go back 90 years to the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, the renown German theologist and one of the founders of the Liberal Party of New York:

In his “Moral Man and Immoral Society” he wrote:
“However large the number of individual white men who do and will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”

90 years later and even the attempts at a form of racial equality are feeble and end miserably…the end of cash bail causing outright criminality of NYC streets and the inability of a Democratic Governor and Mayor to end the lunacy.

Are we suggesting that every Republican who supports the words and actions of Donald J. Trump is a racist or, for that matter given recent activities, anti-Semitic?

Absolutely not. We’re not even sure that Trump is but we know he knows his audience well…all 40 million of them by last count.

We think that he, like his supporters, simply doesn’t care.

There will be no second Civil War because while America struggles with its present and its future, there is an essential desire to remain one even if we have trouble finding answers that work.

But unless and until we begin to educate Americans again…something we did once but do not do now… what Niebuhr saw a century ago might eventually be true.

Is force the only genuine answer to find freedom, justice, opportunity, democracy and equality in America?