Dear reader: this is not a political statement in any way, but rather a commentary on our current political landscape. Please do not take this as me preaching what is right, but rather how we should express our opinions. I love America, but I write this anyways in sadness at how we discuss and form policy.
Do I believe that the events in this story will actually occur? Not literally, of course. However, I think that how we talk about politics needs to change, regardless of which side you’re on. Please, do not assume that I am on your side just because we share similar political viewpoints. We are all at fault here, and we need to change how we engage in political conversation.
Thank you, and enjoy.
The End Of America: The year is 2050. Armed with social media, childish insults, and statistics selected to confirm their extremist opposing views, ordinary Americans divide into teams of "snowflake" liberals and "racist" conservatives. Both sides equally convinced that they are the hero in this saga, the American people engage in the bloodiest civil war in human history, ripping each other apart with the confidence that the other side is evil and wants no more than to destroy the country by pushing their own agendas forward. Their ears closed, their mouths open, their eyes filtered to allow only their opinions to be affirmed, the two sides battle to the death.
Decades of hate-filled words, blatant refusal to understand, and dismissing of any opposing views or statistics as false simply because it went against their core beliefs led to a complete inability to work together, learn, and be honest. Instead, a turmoil of blind hatred and destructive commentary boils over into the Second American Civil War of 2050.
This final stage of the long, angry battle between the blind and deaf liberals and conservatives finally ends when two young middle school children, brought up with dramatically extreme and opposing worldviews, stab each other in the chest. They grew up in completely different parts of the nation — one in California, one in Texas — but they grew up together in an extremely opinionated, closed-minded world where the other side was always wrong, where listening to different opinions was weak. Two children who could have bonded over basketball, video games, or playing trombone, were instead brought up divided, and end up as the last surviving members of a divided nation, following their fellow Americans' example and ruthlessly hacking each other to death to end the Second Civil War.
And with that, the liberals and conservatives achieve their goal of destroying each other, only to realize too late that, in their attempt to save the nation by annihilating the other side, they themselves had, together, destroyed the country by being blind to the other viewpoints, by blocking out diplomacy and bipartisanship and respect, by shouting and attacking and destroying opposing thoughts and values without ever pausing to listen, consider, or respect. But this realization came too late, and the opposing sides were already too entrenched in their civil war to stop and heal the division in America.
There was no going back, and so the liberals and conservatives allowed the internal destruction of this nation to continue until the end, when two children, divided only in their political views, followed in their fellow Americans' footsteps by tearing each other down and ending the Second Civil War of 2050. And with that, America perished, destroyed from the inside by political turmoil and partisanship, by divisiveness and hatred, by an unwillingness to recognize that only one America, not one Democratic and one Republican America, can exist.
One could argue that by the year 2018, 32 years before the Second Civil War, the nation was already beyond repair; by then, it was too late to unify the people, too late to fix the problems of partisanship, respect, and hatred, and too late to avoid a political eruption that would lead to the end of America just over three decades later, when two young middle school children fought to the death, leaving behind the mangled, disfigured corpse of their once magnificent country.
