I recently received an email from someone who had read “The Longest Road”, the book I published several years ago describing an overland voyage Leslie and I made from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. The purpose of that 16,000-mile round trip had been to hear from ordinary Americans what they thought held so vast and diverse a nation together. My email correspondent wrote that he and his wife recently traveled 25,000 miles around the country seeking to discover what divides us.

I think his quest may be closer to the right track than mine was. In the past week or so, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot an unarmed black man seven times in the back. Inevitably, protests erupted, and some were marred by spasms of looting and arson. Then, only a few days ago, a 17-year-old self-styled vigilante armed with an assault rifle shot two protestors to death and wounded a third. This past Saturday night, the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon, which have gone on for three months and have often turned violent, escalated into a deadly clash between the left and the right. A counter-protestor belonging to a right-wing group called “The Patriot Prayer” was fatally shot, apparently by a leftist gunman.

What unites us? Less and less, it seems. We now hate one another enough to kill one another for…What? I will not be shocked, surprised, or astonished if I, though I’m now 79, live long enough to see the start of a second American civil war. And if that comes to pass (I pray it doesn’t), it won’t be anything like the first one, with armies fighting armies. It will more closely resemble the fational, chaotic bloodshed in Syria.

I invite anyone who reads this post to answer the question posed above: For what? All views will be respected, so long as they are expressed rationally and with civility.

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