Several years ago, the Left was excited by tearing down Civil War memorial statues; this year they have so far made two assassination attempts against a presidential candidate as if the US were Mexico.

Last year, I drafted a few hundred fiction stories; this year I have been editing. Below is the draft of the beginning of a novel that I am developing about a future Second American Civil War.

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This story has not happened yet; however, today, too many advocate ideas and actions plunging us towards our second civil war.

How will the war begin? Most think the death of innocents. Yet, ideas ignited the conflict long before; symptoms manifested soon after.

Perhaps the desecration and destruction of old statues memorializing the first American Civil War weakened the inhibitions caging the dogs of war. Activists for political rebirth painted those weathered testaments as shameful monuments to human depravity. While claiming stolen valor for defeating a slavery long dormant, those activists undermined the actual symbolization endowed by the statues’ creators, a promise to never have brother kill brother again.

Following the historic war, those grieving lost sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers joined together to raise memorials to the human cost of a war which killed more Americans than any other. Obedient to forms of the past, statutes of horsed generals Grant, Lee, McPherson, and others stood as sentinels against repeating the bloodletting again. Unlike the past, such monuments incorporated the men who served and died under the horsed leader, the lost men for whom their surviving families grieved. Some factories, wasted previously producing the armaments of war, repurposed to manufacture solitary soldier statutes suitable for memorializing the dead American soldiers, whether they had fought for the Union or the Confederacy.

Absent such reminders of the price of political violence, a decadent and increasingly ignorant populace enflamed politics as bloodsport again. Harsh words between partisans grew into blows, leading to shots, before causing death. Like a weak Buchanan, the progressive and conservative political leaders both fanned the flames while ignoring the approaching tempest. A flywheel of injustice and grievance turned faster and faster with growing momentum as a political circus had replaced a sober reflection upon substantive political problems.

The activists who sought to create a new reality by toppling the establishment instead released the horrors of the past, previously only held back by fragile retaining walls. Far from their live-action-roleplay defeating slavery’s legacy, these activists unleashed enslaving the vanquished to the victors and the victors to the memories of their own necessary but abhorrent deeds. Ares strode the land again with a sickle to harvest the corpses of the nation’s youth one stroke at a time.

The events in this tale occur in a future Second American Civil War. A confederation of city states, the Rebels, fights Unionists of the federal government. This premonition begins after years of bloody war, in an obscure rebel-controlled sector of the Ohio military theater where a Union commander known to the rebels as The Butcher had recently achieved unexpected Union victories.

On the abandoned battlefield of a recent rebel defeat, a young female rebel medic searched. This habit had become her lonely quest ever since the day her little brother had failed to return from a skirmish, which took his life. Her oversized uniform, bulky utility belt, and large med bag exaggerated her diminutive stature.

In her left hand, she held a small bag of rocks for defense against nature. She no longer feared so much the crows, turkey vultures, and black vultures who feasted around her on the corpses of her fallen comrades. So much larger than the pigeons of her childhood in the city, these scavenging birds lacked the danger to her of a swarm of rats or a pack of feral dogs appearing to consume the dead. Before the war, human hubris assumed itself the top of the food chain; in battle death, men rejoined the food chain as the prey of not only birds, rats, and dogs, but also the occasional coyote, fox, raccoon, or opossum before consumption by bugs and bacteria.