A second civil war?

A couple of months ago, we met some friends at a winery in Antietam, Maryland, site of one of the last and certainly bloodiest battles of our Civil War.

- JONATHAN KRONSTADT

Driving its rolling hills, I was reminded why I don’t ever visit any of the Civil and Revolutionary War battlefields that dot this area: because thinking about war is depressing, and since there are more than enough present armed conflicts to fully bum me out, I see no need to dip into the past for a sadness booster.

A few weeks later, I found myself in a discussion about the future of our ever-so-deeply divided nation, and two genuinely disturbing possibilities were raised: cleaving the United States into two countries along the fault line of political identity, an idea dismissed for being as practical as space exploration on a pogo stick; and a second civil war, also dismissed, but mostly because we were on holiday and people wanted to go swimming.

This second notion stuck with me long enough that when I found Barbara F Walter’s