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We seem well down the path that led to our Civil War in the 1860s. In the decade preceding what was by far the bloodiest conflict in our history, Kansas erupted in deadly violence between supporters and opponents of slavery; it was commonly referred to then as “Bloody Kansas.” Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, was attacked and beaten unconscious on the floor of the Senate by a pro-slavery congressman from South Carolina, who was then lionized by the Southern press and his fellow slaveholders. And, of course, the violence inherent in slavery proceeded on a daily basis.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “testing whether that nation [the United States] or any nation so conceived [in liberty] and dedicated [to the proposition that all men are created equal] can long endure.” While we are not currently engaged in a great civil war, the issues—the preservation of liberty, the belief that all persons are created equal—are largely the same as they were in 1863.
And the political violence around us continues to escalate. It’s not just the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, or the murder of Minnesota’s Democratic legislators, or the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, or the skull-fracturing attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. It’s the seizure, detention, and deportation of immigrants who’ve lived here peacefully and productively for decades. It’s the deployment of the Army to cities opposed to President Trump’s policies. It’s the daily escalation of state violence that deliberately rips gaping holes in both the Constitution and the American community. It’s (to paraphrase Hamlet) the thousand unnatural shocks that we now are heir to.
All of which requires a clear but difficult and exacting course of action from today’s defenders of liberty and equality. It is to militantly but nonviolently fight against the opponents of liberty and equality, who now have forcibly arrayed the state itself against those values and whatever presence those values have in our daily lives. This is a battle that few of us ever anticipated having to wage, but it’s the battle that’s before us, from which we cannot and dare not shrink. |
