Editor:

This holiday season will be the least merry in a long time. This is because families and communities are bitterly divided over the political circus in the nation’s capital. This permeates everything from the availability of pure water, breathing clean air, or even holding a newly born baby. There is no escaping the madness. It is all connected.

Not since the Vietnam War have people been so bitterly divided. Then, there was a continually growing opposition to the war as body bags with dead young men, and men grievously wounded in body, mind, and soul, came back. They had stories of incompetent leadership, no clear goals, and no understanding of the enemy or even of ourselves.

This was in contrast to a shrinking pro-war group, as their patriotic arguments, and Cold War rhetoric, seemed to grow hollower by the week. Therefore, the outcome, because we are essentially a democracy, was pretty foreseeable. Obviously, however, those wounds are not healed.

Yet, the psychology of the current situation is much worse. Now we have two entrenched camps. They are daily hardening their positions. This time it’s not a straightforward matter of counting body bags and listening to stories of outrage, and seeing televised scenes and hearing music that vividly demonstrated a rejection of previous values. Now we have two forces of stubbornness, and they become more and more insulting as the days pass, and the president fans the raging fire.

The president tweetingly predicted that there will be a civil war if he is removed from office. If a civil war can be defined as a few thousand right-wingnut militia, a bunch of KKK and neo-Nazis dead, then OK, go ahead and call it a civil war if you would like. It is increasingly looking like this might happen. Like My Lai village, the enemy is us.

Consider, however, if he stays in the White House, there will truly be a civil war. Neither the military, law enforcement, the nation’s intelligence services, “civil society” and local and state governments, moves as a monolithic force for democracy and all things good. Trump’s recent pardons of convicted war criminals sends an unmistakable message that lawlessness, injustice, and violence and hate now rule this nation. The State Department and the EPA, among others, have now been perverted into instruments of Trump’s “War on Decency and Common Sense.”

A good protest is to choose not to “decorate.”

Tom Gagnon

Rock Springs