First let me give you all a
Despite a few near misses you've managed to keep this thing fairly civil!
Horay for chicken people!!
Having said that: The division in this nation has been this intractable before. And once it led to war. There are two fairly well known sociologists who are predicting that the US will dissolve like the USSR sometime in the next 20 years.
I for one truly hope that this does not happen. War is ugly and painful and usually costs far more than people expect it to. And, I love this country and what it used to stand for. It just really surprises me how little people know about our own history, how quickly they are willing to swallow utter nonsense from a TV station that went to court to win the right to lie on the air AND WON. The quote goes like this, "Just because a news agency calls it programming news does not mean it must be in fact true." If anyone wants it you can find the case, it was decided in FLorida. I can't think of the name now.
I was very excited about the tea party when it started. I truly believe that we need at least one more party to give this mess some balance. But, the Koch brothers really stepped into it and it got skewed when Murdoch decided to throw his support behind it. There are some wonderful intelligent people who have good clear ideas about where this country should be headed. But, they are out-shouted by people who want this to become an American Christian Taliban. Iran was once a very advanced free country. People think it has been a dusty third world repressive backwater forever, it has not. I know a woman who was educated here in the US. Brilliant, lovely woman, she decided to go back to Iran after she finished her PhD. One day she was teaching a class when the police came and hauled her from the room. She was teaching unapproved subject matters in front of a mixed gender class. She was beaten and jailed. When she was freed she discovered the police had beaten her 80 year old mother as well. It took her three years to escape, but she did, with her mother's blessing she got out, leaving her mother behind. It happened quickly. Over the space of a few years when a party got support from the US (we wanted to destabilize the country to get control of their resources) and we helped topple the Shah. All we need is for some country to decide it was time to get control over the US and the same thing could happen here. Don't kid yourself that it could not.
Ten years ago when we had a contested presidential election - remember that? All of my students for my international class vanished. Most of them took off for home so fast they left their belongings behind. They ran for the hills - they expected civil war.
My regular students? Many did not know the election was in question. Some were not clear that we had even had one.
This ignorance and apathy has saved us many times recently. People refuse to believe what is happening so they don't react. That will not last forever.
But, as the two sides disagree both about what is happening and how to stop it it will not be a revolution, it would be civil war.
