A Civil War Hasn't Come to America, a Cold War Has

The heralds of disaster are hard at work right now.

They’re prowling social media with dire prophecies, wielding megaphones in ramped-up rally crowds, and forecasting doom in sweaty Sunday sermons.

They warn us that a civil war is coming.

Such threats are empty salvos made of hollow words, the toothless bluster of paper tigers. They are the last refuge of terrified bullies, realizing that they are on the wrong side of morality and of history.

They’re also a few years too late.

The actual war began long ago.

A 55-year-old mother of three from Madison, Wisconsin, recently opened up to me about her estranged mother, saying, “We don’t talk anymore. She’s not the woman I grew up with.”

Doing the work I do, it’s a declaration of defeat that I hear or read dozens of times a day in some form or another.

In the hundreds of conversations I have with people each week while leading them through the minefields of relational turbulence, that’s the pervasive and enduring truth: the reality of the great separation happening right now in America.

We are at the threshold of our collective tolerance for interpersonal conflict and nearing a point of no return.

There are only so many conspiratorial social media posts you can witness,
only so many heartbreaking text exchanges you can endure,
only so many racist holiday meal diatribes you can sit through,
only so many nonsensical talking point tirades your reserves of compassion can sustain,
only so many times your past image of someone you loved can be desecrated by their actual presence in the present.

Eventually, the exhaustion takes over, and the noise and bombast give way to distance and silence. The unfriendings and ghostings and the disconnection slowly begin to sever the ties between us and the people we’d once called Home.

This is where we are now.

In the days ahead, it will not be the screaming volume that will show us how fractured we are; it will be the strange quiet.

For years, there have been warnings of a coming civil war in this country, but that’s always missed the point. Such an image implies aggressive physical combat, evoking images of brother killing brother in bloody, acrid battlefields; a brutal and violent hand-to-hand battle waged in close quarters. That doesn’t define the rules of engagement in our collective struggle.

What’s increasingly clear when people tell me their stories is that a relational cold war is already upon us: that the coming season in America will be marked by emotional distance where proximity once existed. It will be made of empty chairs and blocked social media accounts and separate holidays and protracted non-communication. It will be a widening divide created by profound moral incompatibilities, revealed in ways that would not have existed in any other circumstances.

We’ve been in the middle of the fight for a while now. Our families and friends and neighbors declared war on a Tuesday in November: a war on character and decency, a war on honesty and empathy, on kindness and forthrightness, on facts and humility—and we were unceremoniously drafted that day.

Since then, the battle lines have already been well drawn, the trenches dug deeply, and the heavily fortified bunkers erected between spouses and siblings and best friends and co-workers. Their once unbreakable tethers have been irreparably severed in the hourly skirmishes and daily battles of warring theologies, tribal politics, opposing convictions, and conflicting versions of America’s greatness.

I suppose in this way, the past ten years have been a bittersweet gift to us: a pulling away of the curtains of decorum and phony civility, allowing us to see people’s hearts with clarity. We can no longer hide behind the stories we thought were true about those we love and share life with, and about the place we live. We’ve all shown what sides we are on and the hills that we’re willing to allow relationships to die on.

The emotional distance now may be a temporary knee-jerk response of the initial shock of realizing we didn’t really know people we love as well as we once thought we did, of understanding the severity of the disconnect. With time, common ground may be mapped out and a tenuous truce reached and a new uneasy peace negotiated—but there is also a great likelihood that this will be an enduring divide that time proves was simply too much to overcome. We may be sitting vigil for what will never return again.

So yes, the violence and bloodshed may surface from time to time, but that will not be the fatal blow to our nation. That will come, not with fists and guns and voices raised against our own, it will come with a prolonged silence that may be far more deadly. It will be the quiet attrition of intimacy that we will grieve the most.

We’re already in a war here in America. It’s just not the one we most feared.