On Buffalo

It's going to get worse.

It's bad enough already. Today, a young man walked into a grocery store in Buffalo -- in one of the city's blackest neighborhoods -- and started killing people. He live-streamed the massacre. Police say it was "straight up racially motivated."

Assuming this bears out, we can add Buffalo to the list of racist massacres in recent years. Charleston. Pittsburgh. El Paso. Christchurch. Etc, etc, etc. The blood of black and brown people keeps being spilled by white people who somehow delude themselves into thinking they're acting in defense of something. They do this because they believe lies -- that white people are being "replaced" by immigrants and minorities, that white people's lives have more value (or that black and brown ones have less, take your pick), that these poor people who were grocery shopping were the tools of their oppression.

God help us. God damn this evil.

It's hard not to sense that we're closer to the beginning of whatever this racist evil is than to the end. It’s going to get worse. And that’s terrifying.

And here’s the thing: I don’t trust myself to write with any sort of wisdom when I’m filled with rage and sorrow and fear. I don’t trust myself to act, because the 21st century — not to mention all the other centuries — is filled with some fairly obvious examples of people and nations lashing out in rage and sorrow and fear in ways that created so much more harm, and so much more evil.

But it’s impossible to call a timeout. History keeps moving.

For the last few years, I’ve been asking myself if we’ll know when democracy ends. I don’t think so. We’ll still have some of the forms of democracy, elections, even if the substance looks less and less like what we’ve known until one day it just won’t be what we’ve known.

Now, another question. It’s one I hate to ask or say in print, because I’m afraid of being shrill, afraid that by putting the words down in digital ink and then putting them out there for the world to see, I’ll inadvertently help summon the awful thing. But I’m going to ask it anyway, because I don’t think it can be avoided.

Will we know if a civil war has arrived?

I don’t know. I don’t want it to happen, and I suspect most people reading this don’t want it to happen either. And yet. It may be that we’ll have the forms of civil peace, even if the substance looks less and less like what we’ve known until one day it just won’t be what we’ve known.

I think about what my friend Damon Linker wrote after Jan. 6:

I think it's an error to assume that any civil war that might arise would need to resemble the one that tore the country apart from 1861 to 1865… Another model of civil violence is The Troubles that rocked Northern Ireland for 30 years beginning in the late 1960s, with factions aligned with the (Catholic) Irish Republican Army, which sought unification with Ireland, squaring off against those allied with the (Protestant) Unionists (backed by English troops), who wanted the territory to remain part of the United Kingdom. There were some conflagrations in this conflict that resembled traditional military battles. But most of the time the republican side waged its side of the war through acts of terrorism at home and abroad, while their opponents used brute force to crack down on the roiling insurrection.

“Acts of terrorism at home and abroad.”

What does that sound like, if not Buffalo? Or Pittsburgh? Or Charleston? Or El Paso? Or Christchurch?

What if — and God, I pray this is not true, but I am terrified that it is — our civil war has already started? The young man who shot up a Buffalo grocery store seems to think it’s true, at the very least.

It feels like a sin, honestly, to type that. Because maybe it hasn’t, or maybe it has and will peter out on its own, but maybe either way just talking about it adds to the momentum of it. Maybe the best way to deny the power of the gunman’s beliefs is to not let him draw us into war? Or perhaps that’s just a form of sticking our heads into the sand. I don’t know. God, I do not know.

What I do know (and forgive me for repeating myself) is that I do not want this. You don’t either. Civil war of this sort — if it happens, if it’s happening — will be enacted by a very few people. Most of us, I truly believe, just want to live peacefully with our neighbors, and let them do likewise. It only takes a few dark-hearted men to upend that script however.

If it happens — if it’s happening — we and our children and their children will feel it for generations. There will be more deaths, and more suffering. And as we know all too well, civil wars don’t necessarily, truly end. Their legacies drift through the ages, hardening the survivors against each other in an endless cycle of blame and recrimination.

What we do now will reverberate.

God help us.