There's a saying that's become very popular over the past few years. It's sometimes falsely attributed to Vladimir Lenin or other historical figures, but ultimately it seems to have just appeared in our modern lexicon. It goes, “There are decades where nothing happens. There are weeks where decades happen.”

We’ve passed through a lot of those weeks lately.

I try to stay abreast of everything that’s going on in our country – politics, society, public opinion – but it’s hardly possible anymore. You know what I mean? Something huge will happen, like a vote on a major piece of legislation that would impact millions of Americans. A day or two passes, and before you can even start to think about how it will affect the country, something else huge happens, like some kind of saber-rattling against a nuclear enemy. You try to process that, and it all just gets swept aside by the next big piece of news.

That’s just how it goes these days. It’s tiresome, and it really starts to wear at you. I’ve talked with some other folks our age, and we all agree that it’s very tough to be blissfully unaware these days.

It feels like now we go about our days, always holding this little thing in the back of our minds that has us wondering what will happen next in this great big nation we call home. What mass shooting, what terror attack, what riot, what executive order, what escalation in rhetoric, what controversy, what tragedy will hit America next?

This week, after more developments in the Russia-Trump Campaign controversy and threats of nuclear war, it was a series of riots that threatened the virtues of America itself.

Through the weekend, the city of Charlottesville, VA - home to the University of Virginia - was immersed in a tide of violence and hate. Allegedly rallying in support of preserving Confederate statues, neo-Nazis, militia members, and white nationalists took to the streets with torches and Nazi salutes.

Facing them down were countless counter-protestors, including the united clergy of several denominations and religions who locked arms and sang "This Little Light of Mine."

It wasn't long before the protests turned to violence.

The Root reported on this incident, in which an unarmed black man in a parking garage was set upon by white nationalists and beaten with poles. Neo-Nazis and counter-protestors frequently brawled with one another in the streets.

A reporter for the New York Daily News recorded this video of the attack:

Fight broke out. Nazis beat black kid w/sticks at end. I kick one in back 2 help & he runs after me. Kid is safe but bloody #Charlottesville pic.twitter.com/kr11a8zQ0K
— ChuckModi (@ChuckModi1) August 12, 2017

And finally... a life was taken.

Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was in the streets that day participating in a peaceful counter-protest against white nationalism. One of the neo-Nazis, who was photographed earlier in the uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America and carrying a shield, sped his car into the counter-protest.

He did it deliberately. He knew what he was doing. He murdered Heather Heyer and injured nineteen others. With bodies splayed around his car, he sped away. He was arrested later that day.

As if all of this wasn't horrible enough - that people had been maimed and killed by their fellow Americans in the name of fascism - the reactions I saw made it worse.

Some people seemed to find hilarity in the terroristic murder of their countrymen, just because they happened to not agree with them politically.

A man on a Facebook discussion group for my hometown left his thoughts on all this. He said, "[The] Left wants a pity party. It was bound to happen sooner or later." He responded with the "laughing" reaction to anyone who pointed out that a person had been killed.

What the hell have we become?

The kind of division and hatred we saw this weekend in Charlottesville scares the hell out of me. It wasn't just this one instance. No, Charlottesville was just a symptom of a larger disease in our country.

Over the past few years, hatred has spawned a new face in America. It's gone from wearing a hood and hiding its face... to wearing nice collared shirts and marching with pride.

This is a sick new kind of hate too - a kind that has only rarely appeared in this nation. These are fascists - actual Nazis. They believe in the biological superiority of people of northern European descent. They believe that America should be a "white ethno-state."

They believe Jews are running an international conspiracy to enslave the rest of humanity. I had three great-grandfathers who fought on land and at sea to halt the spread of fascism back in the 1940s. I'm sure many of you have grandparents who did the same.The Greatest Generation, who helped send Nazism back to hell where it belongs in 1945, is slowly passing away. There are very few American veterans left who helped destroy Hitler's SS and who saw the few emaciated survivors staggering toward them as they liberated fascism's concentration camps. Of the Americans who fought long and hard to destroy even the symbols of Nazi tyranny and hatred, very few remain.

I wonder, then, if that is why this sort of evil has come creeping into our nation. Most of the people alive today have no memory of what fascism and hatred is capable of. But to them, it looks sleek, stylish, and attractive. It makes them feel powerful, so they embrace it.

We're on the edge of something dark here in the United States.

Hatred and evil are becoming more and more popular with portions of American society. It has started wrapping itself in our patriotic symbols. This is an advertisement for the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville this past weekend.

Does the symbol look familiar? That's because it was a cartoon created by Benjamin Franklin that was used to create a sense of unity between the American colonies in the years before the American Revolution.

This isn't the first time hatred has claimed to be patriotic... Below is a photograph of American Nazis rallying in Madison Square Garden in 1939.

Something has to give...

I don't want to sound prophetic or something, but I really believe something very dark is coming toward this country. I'm not sure what it is or when it will happen, but it's not good. We have become so divided as a nation that if someone on the other side of the aisle is killed, many of us won't think anything of it. We love to think of the suffering of our political enemies.

We have begun to alienate each other and open a huge chasm in between the people of this country. What's beginning to fill that chasm is violence and hatred.

This division is only growing stronger every day. We're so terrified by the terrorists outside our borders that we forget about the ones that are born and raised right here in the USA and would love nothing better than to kill their fellow countrymen because of their political beliefs.

Either this polarization will end somehow, or we will continue to walk even closer to the darkness. What may lie in wait for us in that darkness? Mass murder? Destruction? Civil war? Any of them are possible.

These are the times that they will write about in the history books.

You know in your history textbooks how when a chapter begins, it explains the social movements behind everything that the chapter discusses? It explains how this government came to power, or why that war started.

We're in that part of the chapter right now.

The history book is not yet written. We can still change what this chapter of our history will be about. But we don't have much time left. Think of what our grandchildren will remember us for, and take action for them.