America is too Lazy for a Second Civil War

I know everything seems bad, but...

Apr 10, 2024

America is seemingly divided on an irreparable scale and the cleft only appears to widen with each passing day. It’s complicated. On the one hand, the most civically active and annoyingly deranged hobgoblins have been getting upset by the same stuff every week for the last decade. But also, on the other hand, have you seen the stuff that we’ve been getting upset about? There are feckless billionaire weirdos wrecking important stuff on principle or just out of spite, and there are also companies with HR departments that politely request their employees include pronouns in their email signatures. There are toothless or co-opted institutions that fail at servicing this country’s basic needs and there is the woke feminist Barbie movie. There is a manner of cheesy cynical depravities all up and down the culture, and there are 5G vaccines and chemtrails and seed oils and things of that nature. All of this is upsetting depending on whom you ask and whether someone has poured bleach on their frontal lobe. And that’s before we even get into the dim, self-dealing, incipiently fascist tech goons pouting atop great hordes of wealth and creating nothing much of note, and all of that is before we get to Elon Musk-related material.

Given the scope and scale of the fuckery being discussed, it’s easy to get sucked into a wide-ranging and decently heated speedrun through endless discourse regarding America’s inevitable descent into a second Civil War. Entertaining this idea would require some prefatory discussions on 400 years of unresolved racial tensions, a dysfunctional government that caters to corporate demands in haste but only knows how to inflict and retroactively justify violence on its citizens, the GOP embracing fascism to own the libs, a ballooning police/carceral/surveillance state, a rising spate of mass shootings and stochastic terrorist attacks, a failing democracy and a rogue Supreme Court, and wealth inequality that rivals pre-revolutionary France. Yes, America is seething with bloody impulses, casually brandishing assault weapons and blistering with misdirected rage, but this is a nation that is also obese, overmedicated, cowardly, addicted to TV, and ultimately lazy.

The omens and signs are janky at best—after all, we have an app that delivers McDonald’s to our doorstep. This isn’t exactly a nation that’s brimming with let’s start a second country energy. The statistical mean of Americans will take their clothes out of the dryer and put them on a chair for several days.

Aside from a few committed blood-and-soil psychopaths, January 6th gave off more of a Home Alone vibe than it did The Patriot. All these patriotic goons who threaten to “go 1776” on their sworn political enemies are Facebook busybodies who’d rather make a lib fume in the comment section than take a rubber bullet or find themselves on a no-fly list. Netflix introduced an autoplay function at the end of episodes because their market research found that we are exhausted after work and roughly 39% of adults under 45 would live out the rest of their lives on their apartment couch if it were feasible. There wouldn’t have been a first Civil War if the soldiers had to risk missing the last season of Stranger Things. If we won’t even reach for the TV remote, it remains a stubborn mystery as to how we would dress for combat. If you think Coachella outfits are ridiculous, what would we wear to the Civil War?

Even the health nuts who should be physically primed for combat would probably just chuck their Stanley Cup at the opposing side. That’ll show ‘em.

No matter how many things are sinking, rotting, diseased, degraded, failing, or generally on fire in this country, if there is a second Civil War, there will be very few participants. It’s just too hard to organize things. Most of us will be on the couch texting something like:

Ahhh!! Sorry… can’t make it. Already took my bra off for the night. Tell me how it goes.
Wish I could participate in the war but work has been crazy lately.
Can we battle over Zoom?
My boss won’t approve my PTO for this campaign.
Are we supposed to fit all our assigned battles into our 2 weeks PTO?
My mom says I can’t go unless she knows who’s going to be there.
If I can’t find a parking spot, I’m going home.
Will there be food trucks parked on the battlefield?
My bad… I overslept. Are people still fighting? I can make it in an hour.
I’m way too hungover for this.
You know, I just don’t do well around blood.
There’s no way I’m going to war before my morning latte.
Ah, sorry… I’m out of town for a wedding that weekend.
This war could’ve been an email.