There is a great book written by Joanne B. Freeman, entitled 'The Field of Blood' (2018). $12 on Amazon as a e-read book.
Freeman discusses at length the thirty-year period prior to the Civil War (1860)....centering primarily upon Washington D.C.
On my list of 100 must-read books by age 40....this book lays out the fundamental differences in people, and how technology (the telegraph, of all things) radically changed the news cycle, affected people in taking sides, and triggered a great part of the Civil War to occur.
Once the smoke cleared in 1865....we were not the same nation. It was not just slavery that fundamentally disappeared....it was a 'binding' (rope) that took disagreeable folks and dragged them toward a national center-point.
One can argue that as the 1990s and past twenty years came into play....cable TV news arrived....the internet delivered the Huff-Post/Drudge....radio re-developed itself into talk-radio....social media arrived, and skepticism has attached itself to every corner of our humble life.
We are a divided people.
Some of us can't attend family Thanksgiving dinners because the 'enemy' will be there.
Some of us can't firmly plant ourselves at the local church anymore because we can't handle peer pressure or dramatic arguments over politics, the environment, or social causes (frankly, we just wanted dramatic talk about Moses, or some Jesus-chatter on reckless lifestyles when we attended church).
Some of us have found ourselves in dental chairs, with serious work about to start....with the dentist suddenly dragging up his pro-Hillary feelings and he's hoping you don't mind him letting you know his anguish. (that was me in 2002 in the dental chair, reassuring the dentist I was fake-fine with his chatter....it's hard to find a good dentist these days....you know)
Some of us long for the old days where idle chatter went to most UFO reports, the latest ZZ Top album, or the six essential problems of 'Return of the Jedi (1983). Instead, these days....sitting at the local breakfast diner....your associate might bring up their fed-up nature of Fox News, their personal feelings over General Flynn, their frustration with ex-VP Cheney, their passion for Senator Chuck Schumer of NY state, or their belief that the Chinese are behind the election chaos of 2020.
Resolving this mess? Next to impossible. Antifa and BLM are ready to set fire to half the nation. Destruction of the news media is currently underway. And no one is that fired-up to say the next four years (either with Biden or Trump)....is going to be that great.
In simple terms, we are reaching the epic point where five or six mini-Americas need to exist, and regionalized governments make more sense.
Folks in northern California will argue that they'd rather be separate from southern California, but they can't seem to find that dividing line or get the numbers to reach a second state.
Folks in Oregon see a fantasy idea now of sixty-percent of the state breaking off....joining Idaho.
At least three additional states are in this break-off fantasy mode.
Urban America? It can't live any longer with rural America.
Covid-19 arriving to intensify this division? No doubt.
So I go back to this book (Field of Blood) and recommend a read. It's a pretty harsh story laid out and literally hundreds of little stories bound into one book....how we logically needed a civil war to end the chaos of Washington D.C. in 1860.
It's stupid to see this talk as accomplishing much of anything, but we seem to have a dividing line, and there's a serious division of society in the country. And our skeptical nature has reached a point of no return.
