I recently moved right smack dab into the middle of a Civil War battlefield. My new neck of the woods in West Virginia and its environs passed back and forth from the Union to the Confederacy 14 times in four years. The local citizenry by mid-war would vote to divorce from the Old Dominion, Virginia, and form a new Union state. The people by and large, according to the local histories, were not particularly ideological, mostly they just wanted the ravages of war to take place somewhere else for a little while. It is hard to avoid thinking about those times as America contemplates a new Civil War or national divorce.
One thing seems clear, this new Civil War will not be a military enterprise. There is no Mason-Dixon line to separate the combatants in our current troubles. There will be no distant battlefield shimmering above with fixed bayonets and bathed in brotherly blood below. Our battles are fought on the high ground of cable news and the endless tortuous fields of social media. Like the denizens of the Shenandoah Valley so long gone, we live our lives constantly amidst both sides. Each takes its turns with our attention.
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