Fighting America's Second Civil War

"We don't talk anymore. My mother is here but gone."

This simple confession, made to me yesterday by a 55-year-old mother of three from Wisconsin about her estranged mother, is one I hear or read dozens of times a day in some form or another, doing the work I do.

In the hundreds of conversations I have with people each week while leading them through the minefields of relational turbulence, one pervasive and enduring truth rises up: the reality of the great pulling away happening right now in America.

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

There's only so many times you can attempt to contest someone's fantastical conspiracy theory with facts they refuse to acknowledge,
only so many terse and extended text exchanges you can endure,
only so many family meals punctuated by profanity you can sit through,
only so many partisan talking point tirades your reserves of compassion and patience can sustain.

Eventually, the exhaustion takes over, and the noise and bombast give way to distance and silence: the unfriending and ghosting and the disconnection slowly begin to fully separate us. This is our second Civil War, and though it is born out of similar moral disconnects and is again rooted in racism and bigotry, it looks nothing like the first.

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 a while, there have been warnings of a coming civil war in this country, but that’s been somewhat misleading. Such an image implies aggressive physical combat, evoking images of brother killing brother in bloody, acrid battlefields—a brutal and violent hand-to-hand fighting waged in close quarters. That does not define the rules of engagement in our current struggle.

What's increasingly clear when people tell me their stories is that a new kind of relational cold war is upon us: that the recent and coming season in America will be marked by emotional distance where close proximity once existed. It will be made of empty chairs, blocked social media accounts, 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.

I suppose in this way, the past few years have been a bittersweet gift to us: pulling away 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 nation we call home, and about the community we’re immersed in.

We've all shown what side we are on and the hills that we're willing to allow relationships to die on.

Some of 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.

So yes, the violence and bloodshed America has previously witnessed in our short history may surface from time to time, but that will not be the fatal blow to our nation.

That will come, not loudly with fists and guns raised against our own, but with an enduring separation and silence that may be far more threatening.

After all the temporary social distancing we did over the pandemic years, because it helped to keep us physically healthy, many of us will now permanently withdraw proximity from people we once called family, in order to keep ourselves emotionally well.

It will be an inaudible, wordless act of war for our nation’s survival.

The second Civil War is here, and it’s being waged in silence.

How have you experienced relational fractures or found a new chosen family recently? Let me know in the comments.