@Jim_Graves Seeing you on the other side! Glad you made the decision to move to a place that fits you better.

@ChrisMayLA6 Disclosure: have had a few drinks and am about to go to bed, but this topic is very important to me so I wanted to empty my brain into a response.

I think (not a historian, not a political scientist, got a degree in economics that I’ve forgotten most of, so take this with a grain of salt) that the civil war scenario isn’t accurate, at least not on its face. Unlike the first go-round there’s not a regional divide. The divide in the US currently largely follows rural vs urban - which is interesting considering the urban centers are the tax base that fund all the things the rural areas need. This is a broad generalization of course, there are rural folks who lean left and people in cities who lean right.

The current administration is focusing its terror on the areas that did not vote for it, and in my opinion it’s largely performative. Not to say that the results aren’t horrendous - they absolutely are - but I think it’s being done for theatre as opposed to policy objectives. It’s telling that the Rapist in Chief touts trying to “liberate” a state that voted for him 3 times…when it did the opposite.

That’s not meant to minimize any of this however - even at the most possible Pollyanna view of this we are experiencing at the very least a constitutional crisis. And it will get worse before it gets better, I’m afraid. And there will be suffering and death, which while always abhorrent is especially so because it is needless.

In short, I don’t think the gravity is overstated…I think the parallel is inaccurate. The geography doesn’t support a civil war (it supports general unrest I suppose, which isn’t really any better). But we have a few things going for us - the admin is growing more unpopular by the day. The urban areas it despises generate the vast majority of our GDP. The most violent and brazenly fascist parts of the admin - the immigration “enforcement” - are even becoming unpopular in part of the right wing base right now. We have a period of chaos and violence ahead of us, but it’s also an opportunity to create a new progressive era after this, which also gives me hope. That along with the number of average Minnesotans continuing to protest. And the number of people in my own state who are protesting. And the number of people who have never protested before that are protesting. There’s something about standing on the side of the road, holding a sign (or in my case a camera), seeing people of all walks of life - even those who visually I would’ve assumed were not aligned with my views - standing up with us and saying “this is bullshit, and it needs to stop.”