I have written several posts over the past year about the situation in the US, including why I don’t think separation and civil war are viable. But I still think we coming to a place where everyone will have to make some choices. The “extremists” are making a lot of noise, and not just on one end of the political spectrum. And the middle ground is shrinking.
This has happened before, in other times and places. In some areas of life, it is going on all the time, whether we notice it or not.
In “That Hideous Strength,” the third book of his science fiction trilogy, C. S. Lewis had one of his characters, Professor Dimble, express what was going on:
“If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, of family—anything you like—at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point where there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”
I am not a prophet (I’m more of a teacher by nature). I have no crystal ball. I am a lifelong student of history (and not just what they taught me in school). I have been aware for some years that we are at a major point of disruption. We have had them before—the Depression/WWII, the Civil War, the American Revolution. And at each of them, people did not know at the start how it would turn out. And we do not know that at this point either.
But each of us has a responsibility to see what is happening and make up our own minds, and do what we can in our own little part of the world.