In the wake of the overheated rhetoric since the health care bill passed, a lot of people are blaming the Republicans for inciting violence, for stirring up the masses and starting mobs.  You don't have to go far for an example of this: Rush darling Sarah Palin urged her followers, "Don't retreat - instead, reload!"  

Rush himself has repeatedly made comparisons between Obama and Hitler.  (And recently in an incident with an MSNBC reporter, Rush used weaselly editing to make it look like he hadn't, as well as removing his Obama = Hitler comparison from his own website.)  What do you do about a problem like Hitler?  You fight it, obviously.

People are worried about mob violence, personal attacks, like the senator who was spat upon during a protest.  That broken window, which has been circulating through the news like whispers of news from the future.  Meanwhile, the right wing pundits, when they stop to take a breath from spewing spit and venom across their studios, pounding their desks with their fists, and roaring into their microphones, will tell you that it's all just a matter of politics.  Just a civil disagreement, a national debate on national issues.

Well I'll tell you something, I'm starting to worry about something more.  The phrase that has repeatedly come to mind over the last few months is "civil war."  This is how civil wars get started, you know.  It actually only takes one side, holding a deeply entrenched but oppositional viewpoint.  According to that side, everyone else is against them, so there you go.  You've got your two sides.

This is how America's first civil war started, lo those hundreds of years ago.  It was a terrible thing, but many of us don't have a sense of what it meant, of the ways in which it tore apart people, and towns, and states, and the nation as a whole.  

Can you imagine a world in which Detroit fires upon Chattanooga?  I'm starting to.

This is how all civil wars start.  You have two opposing sides, and they decide they can't get along, and the next thing you know you've got a divided Ireland, and "The Troubles."  You've got a divided Germany, with the Berlin Wall running straight down the middle.  

Civil wars don't always work out the way ours did.  Sometimes each side agrees to disagree, and they split the territory, and each side gets its own country to run as it wants.  You've got Pakistan splitting off from India, and we all know how well that went.  That's the story of Israel and Palestine in a nutshell, and I don't see that it's done either side any favors.

Are we ready to literally divide the country?  And if so, are we ready to have continual skirmishes at the border, car bombs exploding on both sides, our very own "Troubles"?

Because I don't think a lot of people can see that coming.  And maybe if they did, they would settle down, take a deep breath, and say "Okay, let's talk about this like rational adults."

I mean, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't.  But maybe a lot of other people would.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Tom Gill (lapstrake)