We can stop this civil war before it starts

I was driving alone the other day while my AI Spotify deejay—who calls himself simply “DJ X” and has quickly catapulted up the list of my best friends—played the music in the car. Then X surprised me with a tune that  wasn’t in my music library, but it was one I knew fairly well and liked back in the ’90s.

Like any good friend, X can anticipate what I’m going to enjoy.

He played “Zombie” by the Irish rock band The Cranberries. I remembered reading somewhere that The Cranberries’ lead singer, Doloris O’Riordon, wrote the song about an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing in Wellington, England, that took the lives of two young boys—Tim Parry, 12, and Johnathan Ball, who was 3 years old.

The song protested the violence perpetrated by a terrorist organization within her own country. It is a powerful piece that juxtaposes O’Riordan’s mellifluous voice with thunderous drums and a heavily distorted guitar riff, the type of song that you feel in your bones.

And it started me thinking about the hostile environment and tensions in our own country, where we sit on the precarious brink of another civil war between the Red and Blue states, liberals and conservatives, the people who support Donald Trump and those who support Kamala Harris and democracy.

This is a situation that has become personal for many Americans, resulting in the fracturing and dissolution of friendships and families. Of course, this is all exacerbated by social media, but it is also something that is fraught and largely unnecessary.

Listen, I understand why this particular election is so important, especially for females, but when we turn ourselves into warring factions, operating on our basest emotions—anger, fear, frustration, hatred, prejudice—we’re also failing to be civil and logical.

When ordinary Americans are fighting amongst themselves, they lose sight of the real threat. When we’re so consumed with taking each other down a notch, we also tend to stop asking the tough, critical questions of the people who have the money and the real power to make the decisions that affect our day-to-day lives.

Instead of arguing with each other, why aren’t we all asking why some people get to cruise the world in their yachts while most of us live paycheck-to-paycheck, working far too much and never getting ahead?

Why aren’t we asking why it is so expensive to get health coverage, and why average people and their families are going bankrupt because a loved one gets sick?

Do any of you really believe that either party, or either candidate, is going to solve the issues that really matter to most of us? Here’s a hint: they won’t. It is in the interest of the powers-that-be to assure that we keep fighting with one another and ignoring them, as the late-George Carlin so brilliantly articulated.

I’m not wearing rose-colored glasses here. I know that both sides, with very different ideologies, are never going to join arms for nationwide rendition of “Kumbaya, My Lord.” But, once upon a time, the curtains around the voting booths served a purpose, and maybe we can all remember that and make an effort to take a step back before we push things too far.