What was not the American “civil war” – because the Southern Confederacy wasn’t trying to take over the country; it was attempting to secede and form a new country – was a geographical war. The North sought to force the South back into a “union” the South wished to not be forced to be a part of. It is easy, at any rate, to prove that the war – which was far from civil – was not fought to “free the slaves.” The famous Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until January of 1863 – two years into a war that, at the time, the North was not winning. It was issued because the North was losing – something kids are not taught, either. The Proclamation was a war measure – meant to foment a slave uprising but only in the states of the Southern Confederacy. The Proclamation freed not one slave held in”service” – as it was styled at the time – in states not “then in rebellion.”
Of course, the North eventually did win the war. That is to say, the North succeeded in forcing the states that had left the “union” back into it – at bayonet point. Lincoln had the gall to call this “government of the people, by the people” . . . never mind the Southern people.
Something similar is coming into focus in our time. It is also geographic as well as political – and it will not be civil.
It already isn’t.The two sides that are forming up are city vs. country and this division is as divisive as the Mason Dixon line that divided the North from the South. We can view this division in red vs. blue, very much in the same way that blue vs. gray could be viewed in 1861. Interestingly, blue is the same today as it was then. It is the color of what was then referred to as the “Yankee” mentality, which was a synonym for Puritan or – in our language, today, busybodyism. The idea that other people’s business is everyone’s business. Centralization vs. decentralization. An industrialized falling-in-line and doing what you’re told.
By busybodies, who were typically of the most unctuous, insufferable sort.
And so it is with today’s blues – who control the levers of power because they control the cities. A state can be almost entirely red (today’s gray) in terms of the color of the majority of its geography and yet be controlled by one or two cities that are controlled by the blues. California is an example. It does not matter that rural California – which is most of California – is not blue. What matters is that San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego are blue. The rest of the state has no voice, politically. They are dominated by the blues who control the cities.
It is the same in my own state – Virginia – which is overwhelming not blue, too. Yet because Northern Virginia and Richmond are the state goes blue at election time.
This is political dynamite.
It also gives the lie to the prattle about “our democracy” in that these “democrats” openly say they want the not-blues to have no say. They want to elect their president directly, bypassing the Electoral College, which was put in place in order to serve as a check on the otherwise-lock that cities would have on national elections. On state elections, too – as the Senate is now determined by popular-vote state elections that are – once again – largely determined by the vote-count of cities vs. the rest of the state.
If the president – who has become an elected dictator (just like Caesar, by the way) – is elected by majority vote, then the majority in the blue cities will elect their president and control the Senate and at that point, why even bother with elections?
The country begins to recognize that it cannot reconcile with the city via the ballot box. That a crucible is coming that will determine whether the blues will rule uncontested.
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