More on “How Deep the Divide”

This is, in a way, a reciprocal link, but the piece expands greatly on what I had to say, and it’s more than a merely worthwhile read. Ironbear of Who Tends the Fires has written an essay entitled “So, is it a Spade, or is it an ‘Earth Removal Device’?” Excerpt:

Michele has stated several times that she has bad feelings about this coming November – 1968 all over again, like some bad acid deja vu. I think she’s wrong only on her possible timing. I see that recently she’s come to the same conclusions I did long ago, also: “This far, no farther. It ends here.”

Porretto I believe sees the same light at the end of that tunnel, and he dances at the edges of it, never quite spelling it out. There’s only one real conclusion to a political divide this deep, this wide, and this sharp. Only one way for it to go…

Civil War.

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I have read a great deal of history. And I have read a great deal of past political debate and discourse. Like Beck, the last time I recall that we were this irrevocably divided between major factions was in the 1850’s and 1860’s – and we actually went to war within ourselves over it.

The divide is once again that stark, and that bleak. It’s not “1968 all over again”, it’s 1858.

Unlike the first one, the dividing lines don’t cut across states. Like the first one, the dividing lines are drawn across views of the ownership of men…. of wether (sic) we are owned by ourselves or by The State.

Read the whole thing. And think, really hard, about what he’s saying.

Because I don’t like it, but I don’t think he’s wrong.