“We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War, No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t…”

Tyler Durden ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I’ll be the first to admit that I am a lazy revolutionary. I’m not going to protests, I’m not regularly calling and visiting my representatives (though they do get emails and tweets several times a week). I’m not volunteering for activism. I’m not stuffing envelopes. I sure as hell am not putting on the olive drab hat with a red star on it and living in the damned woods with the rebel army.

I’d have stayed on Tatooine…seriously… but my lack of visible action should not be taken as a lack of interest. I do not consider myself perfectly liberal, but more akin to those early 20th century progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt, a man who I greatly admire in spite of, and possibly because of his imperfections.

However, I do write, and writing involves research, and as a historian, it is the thing at which I am very, very good (not to sound too arrogant – though I do believe that false modesty is a much more nefarious sin than arrogance). Research, when done properly reveals truth. It reveals truth even beyond bias. No, let me correct myself, it reveals Truth – capital “T.” The kind of Truth that has a life of its own. The kind that cannot be ignored, or destroyed.

That said, after a small amount of research, I have learned that over 90% of the wars of the 20th Century, were civil wars. Additionally, civil wars are poorly studied (being distinct from both interstate wars and revolutions). For instance, we have Clausewitz’s “On War,” we have Hannah Arendt, “On Revolution,”both considered seminal studies. There is no in-depth study entitled “On Civil War.” I am not certain I am qualified to write that, but… I may try.

HOWEVER, I have come to believe that the United States is currently undergoing, and has been undergoing for some time a civil war. It is currently a cold civil war, but one that is heating up, with one side or the other escalating tensions instead of alleviating them. both sides becoming more and more polarized in both their rhetoric and their missions.

Turns out the idea of a cold civil war is somewhat novel, why that is, I have no idea. So further research is ongoing and in the developmental stage. We’ll see where this takes us, but the question that must be answered, given the precipice the nation sits upon today, is this…

What will cause a cold civil war to morph into a hot civil war?  I will be exploring that topic in the next few weeks.