It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks there is a war on or not. If I see someone throwing rocks or arguing strongly against what I see as right, it makes a difference if the people around me agree that this is a war, and that those people there are our enemy.
If we aren’t at war, then I can not call them “the enemy,” because that is not nice. I can not say, “You are either with us or against us,” because that is being argumentative, and it is not allowing people to come to their own understanding of a situation.
But there is a war. There has always been a war. Since humans first picked up a bone and then a bigger bone and liked the way it whistled in the air and the sound it made when it hit something, we have been at war. I bet if you looked it up, you’d see that dozens or hundreds of people died today in a war. But you probably would not say “We” are at war.
Who has to be killed for you to think we are at war? And how many of those particular sorts of people have to die before you think it is a war against those particular sorts of people? And how far away do those people have to live before you think it is not a war you have to take a side in?
War is hell. War is the end of nuance. War is “Us versus Them,” and you must take sides and it will get ugly.
But what is it when people are killing particular sorts of people not that far from you, and those people being killed say it’s a war, but the people doing the killing and the people who particularly look like the people doing the killing say there is no war and that we shouldn’t label other people, and that there shouldn’t be this rancor and incivility in our political discourse, and that our anger is not helping the situation. What is that called, because that is what we have now.