I know how some people handle it. By saying they’re going to go out there every day and fight to defeat and get rid of the people who are the problem. But what about those of us who have no herd, no solidarity, who see a danger on both sides of the divide? Is it enough to trust people’s laziness and cowardice to save the future and prevent the terrible events that may be coming from coming?

It is so easy to take everything we have for granted. As if no one in history ever saw things change for the worse. As if great changes never swept through a society and suddenly made things much harder for certain kinds of people. I have been having terrible dreams of late. And I don’t know if they’re dreams that portend the growing, unavoidable danger in our society or the growing, unavoidable danger in the lives of my own family. How long can I keep any of us out of it? How can I help my children? Will they inevitably be drafted by one side or the other?

Recruitment seems almost inevitable. Cartoon network, the daily newspaper, even the public school system are all active recruiting centers now. Pushing children to be activists. College is boot camp before you’re sent out for active duty. The radio programs and podcasts of the patriotic state are broadcasting the message to the troops in the trenches, reporting on the work of the evil empire and the ways our boys are pushing them back. The war isn’t even coming. It’s already here.

I’m not a pacifist, but I reject the choices offered. But how can the armies gathered on both sides already be convinced to just stand down? They’ve been conditioned daily on the need to fight. They want their fight, their moment, their battle, their stand. They want their moment to take it from being more than just a war of words and ideas, a hot cold war. They want a real fight.

Everything is getting swallowed up into recruitment tools and battlefields for advancing the cause. Our movies, our books, our music, our children’s cartoons. They’re all saying that power structures must be either overturned or defended. Everything is a call, not to personal attention to our lives, to responsibility or wisdom or virtue in our own hearts, relationships, work, and behavior, but to change or protect the distribution of power. To change or protect the political and moral landscape by force. And I am terrified what these holy wars will cost us. Even if they stay “civilized”, even if they achieve their ends by quiet shows of social force, repression, shame, intimidation, and re-education.

It’s affecting my sleeping and my eating. I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m gaining weight. But I have good cause for my concerns. I’ve seen the shift in the most decent and earnest of people. I’ve seen the effects of the politics of identity. It’s not enough to not be racist. In fact you can’t be, it’s not possible, if your identity is white and your circumstances are privileged. So the only way to deal with your guilt is to be anti-racist. To be drafted into being an ally in the war on the racists (who are so by dint of identity and circumstance, as we’ve already learned). So what is it that you’re actually fighting to correct? Either whiteness itself or priviledge itself. And those are both problematic targets. But your morality is dependent upon your willingness to commit yourself to the cause. So what choice do you have, if you wish to do the right thing? I’ve seen the most peaceful people repeating arguments justifying violence, the most law abiding justify criminality as excusable and even necessary. There isn’t an upper limit to what this movement can do.

And I’ve seen the same on the other side. Seen reasonable, principled people excusing the most base violations of their own principles for the sake of protecting them. I have seen people excuse, defend, and even venerate the epitome of the violation of many of their dearest values in the battle to protect them. I have seen the madness of hypocrisy. I have seen people who have devoted their lives to decency and honesty stand silent in the face of vulgarity and lies. I’ve even seen them leap to defend it. I have seen the face of advancing morality in our time be painted in the colors of the most base, avaricious, faithless, vulgar, and dishonest behavior. Why? How is it possible? Because your stance on the side of goodness is dependent on your willingness to commit yourself to the cause. I have seen so much on both sides of our political divide. And it is terrifying.

Everyone sees it as necessary, even good, to commit the worst hypocrisies in the service of protecting their values. I have seen the military mindset of the necessity and justification of extremities in fighting the enemy and pushing back and fixing what is or is going wrong. And I cannot say for sure that they are wrong! The necessity is there. The enemy is there. The battle is real. The sides are growing and arming. The recruitment is real, the passion to fight is real, the wartime propaganda that keeps the troops on the front lines inspired is real.

So how does anyone argue for a disarmament when every day the need for arming is proving more real urgent? How does anyone who sees hypocrisy and danger on both sides choose where to stand and what to stand for or against? I am terrified. And not only because it is a war growing, but because it is a civil war. It is a war of brother against brother, sister against sister, neighbor against neighbor. These are the people we love, the people we need, the people we have to live with or live without afterward. We cannot fight them without fighting and destroying our own flesh and blood, our greatest treasure. We cannot burn them out without burning down the house we live in. How can we demand such a thing? Worse still, as the lines draw themselves ever clearer, how can we avoid it? Will those pf us who remain standing undecided in the middle be forced eventually to choose our hypocrisy and pick a side? What will such a choice cost us? What has that choice that so many have already made cost them?

You can’t build a stable future on contempt for the past, or the present. You can’t build it on hatred of half the people in your country and the desire to remove them, erase them, take away their influence, judge them, and punish them. That is your country. That is your family. That is your legacy. That is your home. We need to pause before we’re willing to give up on and get rid of everything that got us to this point. We need to look around and remember that until very recently, before all this, we were the envy of all nations. In fact we still are the envy and desire of many, despite our troubles. There’s something there worth considering, worth preserving, before we burn it all down to get rid of the diseases we believe are infecting it. We might just find that we have failed to get rid of the problem and lost everything we had in the process.

At the moment I have no idea where to turn first. There are already well established structures of power and influence on both sides. Who is a greater risk? Who to choose in the next election? I’m really not sure. Whatever side you choose will only advance the pathologocal causes of both. There’s a power that comes from winning and there’s a power that comes from resistance. Americans love an underdog. And they often need the lesson of how poorly things actually go and how little actually gets accomplished when they do get their way to remind them that maybe the utopian effects of winning political power aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. And being on the losing side, the resistance, energizes people and gives them a story and a cause. Each side needs their enemies, and both sides win, no matter who prevails, in a politics of opposition.

I can see arguments for the benefit of either side winning. Who is a more dangerous option to win in the short term; in the long term? Who would we rather see abuse their power in the pursuit of righteousness, and who would we rather see confirmed in the justice of their cause by becoming a revolutionary resistance, energized by their persecution complex? I can genuinely see the moral necessity for a vote for both sides. I can imagine myself voting either way. What an awful choice confronts us. And what little difference either choice will likely make.

Is it madness to see the end’s beginning written in the choice we see before us? Or does the ubiquity of modern media draw a painted veil over our eyes? Is there still a hidden reserve of great sanity and strength we hide from ourselves, that lives still in our daily lives and small towns and neighborhoods? Can we free ourselves from the worlds we see closing in around us simply by refusing to give them our credence? Might they, like dreams, dissolve before the world of the sane and the real, before the true, plain faces of our brothers and sisters before us and beside us? Or have we gone too far for that? Do we only see the trans-temporal abstractions instead of other humans? White people, black people, liberals, conservatives, SJWs, white nationalists, straights, queers, the patriarchy, feminists?

There is a terrible strength to be found in real life. In work, chores, the daily care of self and of others, the mundane interactions we have with people who are neither friend nor enemy but simply companions in living. There is a deep bloodedness to responsibility and integrity and politeness, a current of the mutual bonds we have forged between us through generations of being thrown together in life. Maybe it can bring us back to our senses. Maybe we’ve fallen too in love with our own mythologies. Maybe they’ve become too real to ignore. But I hope not.