A Most Uncivil War (Act One)

Somewhere in the fall of 2000, the first shot of a war was fired…or in this case, it was not fired. 

It was left in the chamber, where it sits to this day. 

George Bush had just backed into the presidency.  Perhaps he stole it, but that would take foresight and planning that he utterly lacks.  Instead the hanging chads fell his way, and with his legal staff willing to wreak whatever havoc was necessary to gain the victory, he prevailed.  While Al Gore, the popular vote winner, possibly even the Electoral College vote winner, sat with his gun loaded, unused.  He opted, for the good of the nation he loved, to literally hold his powder, call off the legal team’s actions, and concede to the Bush/Cheney regime.  The shot not heard around the world.

And it was at his moment that our nation began its wander toward the situation we find ourselves in today.  A wholly uncivil war.  Gone are the days of political parties negotiating, striking deals, and therefore balance in all things.  A presidency viewed by half the nation as illegitimate was about to be tested in ways that could either heal these wounds or drive the knife deeper into the divide. 

14 years ago, a group of terrorists…religious extremists bent on damaging our way of life, succeeded in planting a destructive seed at the core of our republic.  A wiser, more restrained president…one willing to walk away from a legal challenge for the office that he coveted, might have crafted a better response.  Instead we were left with the very response the terrorists sought from us…instead of adhering to the Christian principle of “turning the other cheek”, we opted instead to follow more traditional Muslim doctrine…”an eye for an eye”. We sought revenge, and that revenge would come against anyone within easy range of our heavily laden bombers….innocent countries and populaces that would bear the brunt of our unbridled anger…our blood lust against a people and religion we lumped en masse with the would be pilots who flew jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  If Al Gore’s act of patriotism was the lighting of the fuse toward our new civil war, September 11^th marked the explosion that would divide our nation in ways that are only just now becoming apparent.

Lacking any real response plan, the Bush/Cheney administration opted instead to initially pursue a single man and his band of followers across an uncivilized landscape in the Middle East.  Whatever the contagion that exists in Afghanistan is that prevents civilized nations from being formed there, that contagion, in some sense has contaminated our own soil.  This isolated landscape, capable of both bitter cold and oppressive heat, had humbled numerous armies and nations trying to rule over its tribal peoples.  Such attempts, like our own, would come to no avail.  Afghanistan, even following thousands of bombs dropped on innocent people guilty only of being born in this region, remains a nation incapable of being subjugated.  The only mark we have left upon it is hatred and the only nation building we have done will cease to exist the moment our presence ends.  All the lives and treasure lost in the quest for one man and his band of followers….none of whom we actually caught there….was more or les in vain.  The lack of anything like a cohesive plan in response to the events of 9/11 has deprived us of anything like moral authority.  Instead, we behaved like a mortally wounded animal, lashing out, kicking, biting and injuring anything that we could reach. 

Unable to reach the victory we sought in Afghanistan, and still thirsty for as much blood as we could drink, we proposed a campaign against an opponent we had already vanquished once in the last decade.  Our mission to topple a weak despot using trumped up charges and outright lies was no less a boondoggle than our foray into Afghanistan.  Only this time, with the heart of an actual nation removed, and no plan to reassemble it, we created a void…a great vacuum into which those that had grown to hate us raced to fill.  In our lust for revenge, and in accordance with the wishes of those who had originally attacked us, we had strengthened our enemies and provided them fertile ground in which their hatred of all things American grow.  It was as if bin Laden had left a script in the rubble of the World Trade Center…a script we were following to the letter.

Meanwhile, the seeds our nation’s demise, sown at the election of George Bush and fertilized by the attacks of 9/11 were beginning to sprout and grow.  The disunity at the time of the election had calcified our political system, and it lost the ability to negotiate, refine and speak with anything like a unified voice.  An illegitimate presidency was followed by a transformational one…but one in which the opposition leadership declared from the beginning that their primary mission was to thwart President Obama’s every move.  Whether it was politics, racism, or some of both, their anti-patriotic stance began to twist and pry the knife at the wound, and the separation became more visible and far less easy to heal.  We were a nation at war…not just overseas, but here, among ourselves. An uncivil war where some made heroes out of those who derided immigrants as “rapists and thieves”.  Some lauded praise on those civil servants who stood in the way of love.  We protected bankers while letting poor people go hungry, all in the name of good Christian values.  We watched a buffoon who wanted to make a name for himself among his constituents taunt an heroic former president, diagnosed with terminal cancer…a man who has defined what a “good Christian “ really is, and who single handedly set the bar for the manner in which a former president should set out to leave his mark upon the world. 

The extreme right wing feels unheard and disenfranchised, and yet how is it that they will ever be brought into a civilized discourse, spewing hatred disguised as religious doctrine?   They bomb women’s health clinics, shoot up churches while people pray to a god who must be very confused by our actions in his name and vote to wage war with yet another nation while opposing the notion of negotiating for peace.  We deny scientific proof that we are killing our planet, and yet despite the fact that we are killing ourselves, we protect our right to have guns more easily obtained than a driver’s license.  And I wonder why?  Why is the notion that a well-armed civilian militia is so important?….and then I fear that  this “uncivil war”  is about to get real.  Will that bullet left in the chamber 15 years ago finally be fired?