Stop Promoting a New Civil War
You would bankrupt the nation, devastate business interests, interrupt international trade, starve tens of millions and leave millions on the verge of death, proving what?
Let me start with a simple question:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? CIVIL WAR?
Okay. I’m good. I just needed to get that off my chest.
Why is anyone advocating for civil war? There are so many reasons civil war is not right for the United States, but one of the most terrifying are the one hundred and fifty years of technological weapons advancement since Civil War I.
This isn’t 1850, where it took soldiers following nine careful steps to load and fire a single bullet from a muzzle-loading gun, and five to fire a breech-loading weapon. Rifle-muskets weighed between six and ten pounds and many were designed to fit a bayonet on the end of the barrel.
Today, an AR-15 can fire thirty rounds and reload in the time it took you to read this sentence.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there were an estimated 24.4 million AR-15s in private circulation in the United States in 2020. A 2021 Georgetown University poll of gun owners in the US found that 24.6 million people have an AR-15 or a comparable firearm. Since many gun owners have multiple weapons, the total number of AR-15s in American hands could be as high as 44 million.
This is a large country with an armed populace. There are no uniforms. There are no rules of engagement. There are no sides. There are no dividing lines. Just fools trying to murder other fools. Or murdering innocent people who happen to be the wrong color, minority group, or women trying to avoid this foolishness of men.
Why is anyone entertaining this ridiculous idea? Stop saying this in public. Stop saying this in the news cycle. Just stop saying it.
“Phil Reynolds, a member of the GOP central committee in California’s Santa Clara County, appeared to urge on insurrectionists on social media during the Jan. 6 attack, declaring on Facebook: “The war has begun. Citizens take arms! Drumroll please….. Civil War or No Civil War?””
“Democrats say the uptick in war talk isn’t accidental. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said Trump began putting his supporters in the frame of mind to make the opening charge years ago and is “capable of starting a civil war.”
“Since his first day in office, this president has spent four years abusing his power, lying, embracing authoritarianism (and) radicalizing his supporters against democracy,” she said in arguing for impeachment. “This corruption poisoned the minds of his supporters, inciting them to willingly join with white supremacists, neo-Nazis and paramilitary extremists in a siege of the United State Capitol building, the very seat of American democracy.”
War is not butter, it doesn’t make everything better
Look buddy. I know you are proud of your gun collection and you have been grooming your children since they were three years old to use guns in a glorious taking back of the country led by your fearless Orange leader, the great Donald Trump.
But I want you to think about something: Nothing you do during your armed uprising will make America better. Not one damn bit.
You think you can’t afford a car today? The supply chain issues have driven up the cost of automobiles up an average of 25% more than they were before the pandemic. This is mostly due to our inability to get the electronic components we need to keep making our technologically dependent modern automobiles. The cost of insuring them is also rising. Ownership of an automobile is starting to look like it will be beyond the reach of the average American for the first time in decades.
After you start shooting other Americans and making people all over the world nervous, they are going to take action. When the most powerful nation in the world isn’t stable, the rest of the world isn’t stable. Quiet as its kept, the world relies upon the stability of the United States, its money and its import/export profile. If we are busy murdering each other, and it spreads widely across the country, our national shipping interests, our truck drivers and other means of moving resources across the country will be affected.
On top of that, you better hope it just stays a trade war. In the dustbowl of the future your civil war would create, the United States best outcome is to find itself under sanction from foreign nations. At worst, some of our competitors might decide there might not be a better time to accidently acquire some United States territory the old-fashioned way: by conquering it.
Since the modern international world hasn’t managed to do anything to stop the Kremlin from trying to take over Ukraine and with five hundred-plus days of continuous warfare seems poised to continue, China might decide to annex Taiwan, and perhaps Hawaii. If that goes well, maybe California. Just keeping it real.
In our best Civil War scenario, no international trade will happen until we can stop the war crimes and other atrocities sure to be going on, and can guarantee the safety of people who would be bringing resources from around the world, you know, the international trade we value so highly: food we can’t grow, electronics we can’t make, manufacturing we no longer engage in. Global stuff. All your favorite resources come from overseas.
“Fifty-two percent of U.S. agricultural imports in 2021 were horticultural products, including fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, wine, spirits, essential oils, and nursery stock. Sugar and tropical products, such as coffee and cocoa, comprised 15 percent of agricultural imports in 2021.”
Everything you value would cost more, much more, your money would be worth less or maybe nothing at all. Surely civil war would cause our money to lose value as people lost trust in the stability of the United States and its financial systems.
All you billionaires might want to get your politicians and their need for attention-seeking behavior, under control. The people they are catering to are about as smart as hot pockets and actually believe a new civil war would be a desirable or even necessary thing in light of partisan politics in America. Between the Dominionist’s future theocracy, and the oligarchical over-development of corporate power, civil war would make both of these a menace to whatever passes for society when the war was done.
There are consequences to your actions
I can assure you, all the fun you would have murdering your fellow Americans would pale in comparison to the loss of almost anything else you valued.
Such as money. “Didn’t have any,” you say? Okay, how about easily available food and water. Both will only become harder to come by during any event which interrupts food and water being transported on American roads. Few places in this country are able to declare they have access to water without having trained water facility workers on staff twenty four hours a day in major metropolises. Civil war means those people might not want to head out to the office. Same for sewage management. These are trained workers providing infrastructure you take for granted who are likely to try and escape with their lives rather than return to work.
The longer the event goes on, the more terrible things will become. Think about medical care, such as it is in the United States. Say goodby to reasonably provided medical care. Possibly forever. We will be rationing care, we will be triaging the worst wounds imaginable. In the dark. High caliber weapons leave devastating wounds and our current medical facilities are not overall prepared to treat mass the mass casualties such an event would inflict.
Our current medical system depends on infrastructure and advanced technology. With just-in-time warehouse stocking, most areas have enough resources to run their hospitals for about three to five days. The United States has more than 5,200 hospitals with nearly 800,000 fully-staffed beds. Yet, certain hospitals struggle today, to keep up with the demands of their communities. Let’s add civil war, doctors already stretched to the max, nurses may not be able to reach their facilities at all and no infrastructure available until the fighting stops.
800,000 beds in a country of 300 million with millions of people fighting in the streets over <insert stupid partisan shit here> and you should begin to see the scope of the problem.
Most Americans are in abysmal shape. Imagine your current health crisis and add bullets. No matter how small, one bullet wound is generally one too many.
But wait, there’s more. Unlike in the cinema classic Mad Max, gasoline on our Earth doesn’t last forever, potent until the last drop. On our world, gasoline, which doesn’t get sold or stolen during the outbreak of Donald Trump’s favorite vanity project, will quickly denature and a year or two after your war begins, you are likely to be walking everywhere because stored gasoline needs skilled individuals maintaining its efficacy. Not to mention there is no way America will be delivering fuel during such an intense destabilization event. When it’s gone, you aren’t likely to be seeing any more any time soon, unless the shooting stops.
We might have enough gasoline for a week, a month if no one is driving. Gasoline is volatile. It doesn’t sit well and destabilizes over time. Hope you have a bicycle, it will be the only way to travel long distances without an engine or gasoline.
Electric? Not on a bet. Not unless you have the total package of solar cell, inverter and powerwall to charge that car. Remember that game, Warlords and Prey? Once a local warlord sees you still have electricity and an electric automobile, then HE will have electricity and you might not be around to care anymore.
Not to mention the electrical grid will be failing all over the country. Wherever there is fighting there will soon be permanent darkness as fossil fuel power plants run out of their favorite distilled dinosaur juice or nuggets. Once the daily maintenance needed to keep power working across the country ends, so will integrated power grids everywhere.
Local stores if they aren’t looted outright, will be empty in two days. Gas stations would be empty in three days. Supermarkets in four. Most big box stores would close and never reopen. Or people would get desperate and break in. Desperation is an ugly thing.
If it’s just a nasty free for all, with people just shooting wildly, no rules, no holds barred, there are not enough cops or National Guard to be everywhere at once. You should expect to be living on what’s in your possession under such a terrible conditions.
Good news, Everyone! Martial law will be declared.
Martial law would be declared immediately. Big cities might get some National Guard support. Small towns would be on their own, left to their own devices to fend for themselves.
So many of these gun-toting individuals believe they can all live off the grid, hiding in the woods and striking out against military forces, who would be forced to deal with whoever thought they should be fighting the government. They think it’s a good idea because they have enough beans to last forever in their bunker.
But how does your bunker get its water? Manage it’s sewage? Provide its own electricity? How long can it do those things if the access to the main grid for power, water and sewage is no longer available. Are you armed to the teeth with state of the art weaponry?
Someone is. And they are likely to devolve into a game of Warlords and Prey where they are the warlord and you are the prey.
“Nice bunker you have there,” said the local warlord when you come out to take a shit because your sewer no longer works. “Be a shame if something happened to it.” Likely the last words you ever hear.
In your quest to “take back the nation” you would destroy it, reducing us back to primitive savages in a modern world while people laugh at us, wondering where and when the greatest experiment in democracy went wrong. They will pore over their history books and decide when that was and then decide what to do with us.
Are we an unstable terrorist nation with nuclear weapons? What happens to the United States military if we have a civil war. The military is not supposed to be deployed in country. Or that is what you have been told. It’s a bit more nuanced than that.
“In the United States, a federal statute known as the Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, forbids the use of the US Army (and consequently its offspring, the US Air Force), as a posse comitatus or for law enforcement purposes without the approval of Congress.”
A loophole!
- If there is a civil war, will Congress be able to agree as to whether the National Guard should be supported by the other Armed Forces?
- Will partisan politics choke off Congress from being able to take this action in a timely fashion?
- Will the taste of martial law become too good to the government and maybe start to look like a time we went door to door and collected a few guns to keep the peace.
Yes. I said it. Your zeal to start a civil war will only reveal what anti-gun people have been saying: You are not responsible enough to have firearms and the government may use this violent action as a means to enact the gun laws the rest of the sane non-gun nuts have been saying. Not saying it’s going to happen, but when strange times come to the world, stranger actions may finally become appropriate.
“Posse Comitatus Act: The act does not explicitly mention the US Navy and the US Marine Corps, but the US Department of the Navy has prescribed equivalent regulations. A directive in 2013 from the US Secretary of Defense directly addressed this issue and prohibited the use of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps for domestic law enforcement. The limitation does not apply to the National Guard of the United States when activated by a state’s governor and operating under Title 32 of the US Code, such as deployments by state governors in response to Hurricane Katrina.”
Wikipedia: Posse comitatus;
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_comitatus
THE OUTCOME IS INEVITABLE: LOSERS. AGAIN.
Odds are, your Civil War 2 would be media-suppressed to keep the spread to a minimum. But if people were focused on using their mobile technology, they might be able to make people across the nation aware something was going on, right before all the good Internet services faded away. Unless it was coordinated beforehand.
When the war is over, could we figure out who started it and why? Assuming we still had a country and weren’t invaded or nuked off the map by fearful foreign nations, if we could figure out who those people were, I wonder if they would get the sweetheart deal the Confederates got at the end of Civil War I.
I doubt it.
With all the money lost on the stock market while this is spiraling out of control, I don’t see the people who control the puppets in Washington, just letting the crashing and burning stock market, the rapidly devalued business enterprises which can’t get back to work because people are too afraid to leave their homes while armed bands roam the streets uncontrolled.
They are going to hang you in the streets. Theoretically. It is hard to know anymore. People are unpredictably unnerving today. I have seen carjackings at 6:30 in the morning on my way to work. I guess anything is possible now.
Look people, it’s simple: No monster trucks. No monster truck rallies. No more truck parts, no more truck nuts. No more diners. No more ice cream. No more air conditioning. No more electricity. No more refrigeration. No more DUFF beer. No more television. No more Simpsons. (Okay, it won’t be all bad.)
I wrote an article on the Zombie Apocalypse and remembered these factoids:
“The electricity grid would likely last for several days to several weeks. However, within 4–6 hours, there would be blackouts and brownouts in many areas of the United States. Within 12 hours, most power systems would be unstable, and within 24 hours, most of the United States would be without power.
“The electricity system would quickly stop working without humans to perform routine tasks. In regions that depend on fossil fuels for electricity generation, power plants would shut down within 24 hours without a continuous fuel supply.
“The public electric power grid would be gone in a few hours, at best one or two days. Some data centers have backup generators, but even those will exhaust their fuel in two or three days.
“Cellphones would go down as soon as the cell towers run out of backup fuel. Most people will have run down their cellphones by that time.”
GO SIT YOUR DUMB ASSES DOWN
You know and I know you aren’t going to start Civil War 2. You don’t have the balls to live without electricity for the rest of your lives. You know who am I am talking to.
Anyone who thinks they’re prepared to live like this:
- Without air conditioning while climate change is rocking the world with the highest temperatures in 120,000 years;
- the average temperature across 200 million Americans is 100° dropping into the high nineties even at night;
- Our last summer would have been an environmental catastrophe. A nationwide failure of air condition would mean millions of lives at risk and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, lost due to temperature extremes alone.
- Without power, there are no cooling centers, no air conditioned facilities, no water to cool off with, no electrical devices like fans, no way to mitigate the extremes in temperature millions of Americans who were not even involved in the fighting would still be at risk.
Let’s face the facts: You can’t live without your Ford F-150, your pecan pies, your Football seasons, your cheap craft beers and rideable lawn mowers. If you start Civil War 2, you risk destabilizing the world, as other countries might decide it should be someone else running the show here. The best time to fight an enemy is when he is fighting himself.
Is that what you want? To be speaking Chinese in the next ten years, in a world run by the Chinese and you living in a slave labor camp for the rest of your lives? What about your kids lives? Because frankly, I have the feeling it might be a long time before anyone from a post Civil War, post World War United States, will be trusted to make any meaningful decisions for the foreseeable future.
Who could blame them?
We had the most progressive nation in the world and we fucked it right off and gave it to fascist assholes who thought the most important thing we could do is cause a civil war, destabilize the country, fuck off the stock market, wait out sanctions, and crater the national economy for the foreseeable future.
I wouldn’t trust you with a damn thing, either.
Not to mention their other agenda which is forcing women to have children, as many as they can for the rest of their lives, (See the Quiverfull movement) while having the American government being transformed into the Republican Wet Dream of their Dominionist Evangelical Theocratic backers.
How could I say such a terrible thing? Because they wrote about it in a document called Proposal 2025, A Mandate for Leadership, in which organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council posit how they can alter the political landscape to give their messiah, Donald Trump, pictured below, the political power he would need to make America Religious Again for the First Time. I provided the link so you can see how they plan to undermine the government in their very own words. You need to read that document. Real talk.
Dominionism Defined
Ever heard of the Dominionists? No? Charming folks. Civil War would allow them to get rid of several of the obstacles they have to making America a new theocratic government, outlined in Proposal 2025. It might be the most terrifying thing you ever read. The first fifty pages are a barn burner.
Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.
They interpret Genesis 1:28 in the Bible, which refers to people having dominion over life on earth, as meaning that Christians should exercise control over the seven major institutions that comprise society: Family, Religion, Arts and entertainment, News media, Education, Business, Government. Adherents to dominionism often talk about a “biblical worldview” or “building the kingdom”.
- Dominionists celebrate Christian nationalism, in that they believe that the United States once was, and should once again be, a Christian nation. In this way, they deny the Enlightenment roots of American democracy.
- Dominionists promote religious supremacy, insofar as they generally do not respect the equality of other religions, or even other versions of Christianity.
- Dominionists endorse theocratic visions, insofar as they believe that the Ten Commandments, or “biblical law,” should be the foundation of American law, and that the U.S. Constitution should be seen as a vehicle for implementing biblical principles.107
Of course, Christian nationalism takes a distinct form in the United States, but dominionism in all of its variants has a vision for all nations.
Think of them as the American Taliban. No turbans. No beards. Theocratic rule, in all things, in all ways.
What about COVID?
Notice I said nothing about COVID.
Why? Because the scenario we are positing is already dismal with the loss of power, water, heat, light, plumbing, air conditioning, trade agreements, import/export, oil, coal, gasoline, food, hospitals, sewer systems, automobiles, tablets, cell phones, let alone all of the other distractions we have become so accustomed to like an entertainment and media system, movies, video games, restaurants, pizzas, pizzas, not a typo. I would miss pizza twice.
We would be reverting to barbarism while battling the forces of climate change without the benefit of technology. With the loss of all infrastructure, with people cowering in groups, without means of medical intervention, the disease would run rampant across this country interrupting your civil war with bouts of disease spreading freely across the refugee camps and squalor the nation has become. Huzzah.
That’s why I didn’t really think adding COVID to the mix was necessary. This thought-experiment is miserable enough.
Civil War 2 would not be over quickly, it would destabilize our way of life in such a way, America as we knew it might never again exist.
Did I miss anything?
It is so easy for people to spout off and get some cred from their base for supporting the idea of Civil War. Without trying to get too graphic or too horrible, I have endeavored to share with you what the idea of Civil War would mean and the absolute and possibly permanent shift in the fortunes of every American.
We simply cannot indulged the idiocy of a relatively few individuals who remain unclear on the interdependence of thousands of systems which are necessary to keep the trains running on time.
Once more for all the prosperous and economically-enviable individuals in the United States:
If you like having money, if you’d like your money to to still have meaningful values for the foreseeable future, (at least until climate change bankrupts us all) I would suggest you stop your puppets from proposing Civil War to their base. If enough idiots participate in this idea, you and your businesses will fall, possibly causing a cascade throughout markets around the entire world.
This is a real possibility with all of our markets feeding synergistically upon each other in a feedback loop, like it or not. Our money is their money. Their money is backed by our money. But truth be told, no one is going to risk going to work if they can be killed by roving militiamen enforcing that New Great America they keep going on about. Especially if they realize their money, even if they had it, might not be worth a dime on any market.
The true consequences of engaging in a foolhardy endeavor as your so-called Civil War 2 will only ensure even more toxic individuals will end up being in control of the ruins of the former United States of America.
Unscrupulous men and women who have less good will, less reason to not be autocrats, every reason to be violent and dangerous, individuals who may or may not be the only thing standing between you and a real invasion of the United States from an outside enemy while we are at our most vulnerable.
These same individuals who could be deemed inadequate in reasoning capacity because they helped cause or somehow ended up in charge after a civil war, did, in essence, inherit the remnants of the country they have left in tatters.
Do you, with a foreign enemy at the gate, expect them to protect what they helped destroy?
If I were a foreign nation, feeling ballsy, I might invade the United States, with my state of the art army, just like NATO let Russia invade Ukraine. What’s the rest of the world going to do? Nuke my country? They may as well nuke themselves. Bartender, nukes for all my friends!
Causing a Civil War in the United States is literally the worst idea imaginable. And yet the possibility still looms. Just as real as any. Not because it’s a good idea, but because so many desperate people, living on the psychological brink of a three year pandemic, without mental health care, without achieving some kind of cultural resolution, divided by crazed partisan politics, fearful people who believe the murder of other citizens in their country would improve their lot in life, are out there. Armed. Waiting for a call from on high.
Remember we talked about desperate people? They are the worst.
How’s your Chinese? I’m already working on mine.
再见
Zài jiàn
Goodbye in Mandarin: literally, I would like to see you again.
