Any hint of an unacceptable opinion could bring physical harm or financial ruin.Ī similar radical polarization is going on in our own day. In time, merely to survive, they fell silent or converted to the secessionist cause. Their reluctance to join the secessionist movement put them increasingly at odds with the vehement majority around them. In Atlanta in 18, there were many people-indeed, even many slaveholders-who understood themselves as part of the Union, enjoying the American heritage of George Washington and the Founding Fathers. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness.” In such circumstances, the word “good” signifies whatever serves one’s own interests. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter prudent hesitation, specious cowardice moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. So radical was the hatred between the common people and the rich oligarchs in Corcyra early in the Peloponnesian War that “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. In a section of Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta, Mark Wortman shows how the fever for secession came to Atlanta.Īs his epigraph to these chapters, Wortman quotes a famous passage from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which our freshmen at Wyoming Catholic College read in the spring semester. A book I have recently been reading about Atlanta in the Civil War unexpectedly sheds some light upon our contemporary scene. But it helps to put our polarized situation into context. It’s easy to get sour when you see your own reasonable opinion distorted and misrepresented. The hard question facing us is a political one: how long will we be able to sustain our constitutional forms? The still harder question, though, is what it means to follow Christ’s law of love.Īnother election is coming up, which means that accusations, distortions, and misunderstandings, often deliberate ones, dominate the public discourse. Knowing better, people interpret others as short-sighted and selfish, demonize their affiliations, and tar them with imputed evil. A radical polarization is going on in our own day.

Sweet reason