RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) It would be nice for this gringo to be able to follow recent advice to “lighten up”, to stop writing pieces that can rightfully be said to be “dark!”. I have been cautioned that we need not assume that the light at the end of the tunnel is the proverbial oncoming freight train.
I wish I could. I spend a lot of time searching for topics readers might find, if not actually ‘uplifting’ in the inspirational sense, at least containing more than a glimmer of hope and a positive outlook. Perhaps the blame can be laid on the toxic pandemic cloud hanging over all of us and the need to still put boringly strict social distancing ahead of the excitement of a free social life. Whatever the root cause, the darkness is hard to dispel.
Part of the reason is the fact that we may be living on the cusp of a civil war, most predominantly in the US but spreading like a virus around a world already immersed in conflict. It is not (yet) the conventional kind with guns blazing, building burning, and the streets stained with the blood of committed martyrs from one faction or another, even if there is an increasing amount of bloodshed.
This civil war is even more insidious. Where it will lead, no one knows but the signs are not good.
War is never civil. Whether the primal cause is the thirsty lust for power by groups who feel disenfranchised or those who hold (and may be willing to fight and die for) an ideology they believe superior for the public good as well as their own, civil war really boils down to a struggle for power.
Ours is a struggle for power between realities, real and alternate.
The suspension of disbelief is the willingness we all must have to accept an alternative reality – in the arts when we engage with the characters and situation of a play or a novel and in life when we willingly accept as true, something we have no rational basis to believe.
‘Suspension of disbelief’, an expression attributed to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, is a lively aspect of the human condition. It’s fun for us to fly ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ with Superman or dive ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ with French novelist Jules Verne. No difficulty deciding which side of the line is real and which is alternate.
Our current problem is decidedly not fiction. It arises in knowing what to believe, differentiating the fiction from reality. In a media-driven universe flooded with what appear to be solid realities, it is increasingly difficult to decide what is mainstream truth, what is an alternative, and where the line is. Belief doesn’t mean that something “is”. It only means that we believe it is.
Is it possible that we have been mistaken in believing that the US is fundamentally unified, peace-loving, and democratic, its differences on its fringes rather than at its center, its gun-culture a leftover from the frontier era, not an existential threat?
In a noteworthy article in ‘Washington Monthly’, Daniel Block ponders wisely; “…it occurred to me that we’re not so much going to experience prolonged, acute civil violence after the January 6 insurgency. We are already experiencing it and have been for years.”
Despite overwhelming evidence of a fair and honest 2020 election, a reliable Quinnipiac University poll says 77% of Republicans embrace the alternative reality that there was widespread voter fraud. That’s serious but not nearly as disturbing as findings by the American Enterprise Institute that more than half of Republicans say they would use force to “save the traditional American way of life” which they see as rapidly disappearing.
For many Americans, especially in the South, the economic and social reality of slavery was clear, and its carry-over to white supremacy is no less so. Today’s insurrectionists are fearful that their privileged position is nearing an end. They are probably right – black, brown, and immigrant lives and votes matter, and they threaten historic white superiority.
That is their primary issue and that is the fuel that feeds this fire. It is not a fire that is likely to be brought easily or rapidly under control. Framed as a battle for survival, like all wars, it is a battle for power.
Daniel Block has observed; “The present United States may be more polarized than it has been at any time since the 1850s. Many of the social issues that divide us, in particular, questions of systemic discrimination, stem from slavery.” As alarmingly demonstrated on January 6 in the insurgent attack on the US Capitol, today’s issues are not that different from yesterday’s. The difference is that the vitriol has now burst into the open.
After decades of constant percolation, the ingrained hostility and anger of the white supremacists and their ‘America First’ followers is a hard ask to tame. History has few examples of the depolarization of countries where the level of civil unrest has risen so intensely and rapidly.
We have already seen horrific things beginning to happen in the recent multiple shootings concurrent with the George Floyd murder trial which is, at this writing, waiting for a verdict but ready to explode into street violence whatever the jury decides.
With certain American political elites fueling extremism to gain more power for themselves, and with a population that has lost confidence in the voting process, some people are going to reach for alternatives that could make the Capitol attack look like a rehearsal.
Imagine the secession of a few blue states, the coalition of some heavily armed militia units attacking public buildings and peaceful protestors, support from rogue police who believe the public has lost proper respect for them, and the cacophony of right-wing broadcasters urging them on with wild conspiracy theories designed to swell their audience ratings. It is not a pretty picture but sadly, it is a possible one.
If the US is heading towards widespread political violence – or even a second civil war – however unthinkable that idea might have been just a few years ago, it is one we had better take seriously now, and do our best to avoid.
No wonder it is difficult to ‘lighten up’.