Uncivil

 "Whaz so civil 'bout war anyway?" - Guns 'n' Roses

It seems to me that there has been more than a little talk lately about "a new civil war." Maybe we should begin by clarifying some things: The first American Civil War was probably the one that had us fighting off those oppressors from another continent who saw us as their property. Hindsight has us calling this one "Revolutionary" because we won. The next time we had a Civil War it was because people on one side of the country had factories and the other side had slaves. The side with the factories won that one. Slavery was abolished. And every so often, a few years after that one was settled, there are folks who feel compelled to recreate it. Usually they do this by dressing up in uniforms of the period and pretending to shoot at one another and leave historically accurate corpses across battlefields where the war between the states once raged. 

And sometimes, like right now, people get it into their heads that this would be a good thing to do all over. For real. Heck, they've already got the flags. We've got plenty of guns. And maybe, just maybe the side who used to have the slaves can win this time. Not that anyone would put it in those terms. We are led to believe that the tiny minds that carry the ideologies of the conservative right will prevail. At which point they would most certainly turn back the clock to a simpler time. Before all this "woke" nonsense. When men were men and women were men's property. And speaking of property, what was really so wrong with slavery anyway? Sure, it was an evil, but a necessary evil. And all that stuff about fractions and three fifths of a person was really hard math and couldn't we just return to the age of white men's votes counting and throw all the rest out? All of this "inclusion" just leads to trouble anyway.

These are the yahoos who are already openly advocating taking up arms against those they see as their oppressors. Like Luis Miguel, a Republican candidate for Florida's House who was banned from Twitter after posting his vision: "Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds ON SIGHT! Let freedom ring!" Mister Miguel is not a fringe-hanging militia member. Like his fellow Floridian, Martin Hyde, who in his attempt to bring some much-needed heat to his primary run against fellow Republican Vern Buchanan, insisted that he would have done away with any FBI agents who made the mistake of showing up at his door. "I wish they'd turn up at my home 'cause they'd have gone home in a body bag." 

Of course, this nonsense is just the thing to get inside the pointy heads of people who were far too close to the edge in the first place. Ricky Schiffer went to the Ohio field office of the FBI dressed in body armor and carrying a nail gun as a response to the Bureau's execution of a search warrant at the former game show host and twice impeached "president's" golf club. He was shot and killed by police. Rather than being made a martyr for the cause, many of the MAGAts are distancing themselves from such anarchic behavior, referring to the incident as "another false flag incident." 

And when it comes to flags flown over this part of the continent, that makes some sense. To some of the pointier heads.