{"id":335195,"date":"2025-12-07T14:41:23","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T14:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/335195\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T14:41:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T14:41:23","slug":"is-a-civil-war-possible-in-america-or-hawai%ca%bbi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/335195\/","title":{"rendered":"Is A Civil War Possible In America \u2014 Or Hawai\u02bbi?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re living in difficult times. Here are snapshots of possible scenarios in our near future.<\/p>\n

Jim Leahey, the voice and face of local sports (and much more), once told me Hawai\u2018i\u2019s DNA is a triple helix of unique geographies, ethnicities and our own way of talking.<\/p>\n

Others I know say we are a melting pot, a term my colleague Chuck Crumpton despises. He says, \u201cWe aren\u2019t some kind of mush or gruel; we\u2019re a fresh salad with lots of nourishing ingredients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our social, political and economic genetics \u2014 our salad \u2014 has always been influenced by events that washed up here from elsewhere, usually America. All of the changes, some of them major upheavals, are chronicled in books like \u201cShoal of Time,\u201d \u201cCatch a Wave,\u201d \u201cCaptive Paradise\u201d and even the quirky \u201cUnfamiliar Fishes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yet, here we are. We are still \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/a>Civil Beat is focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What islands know for sure is waves will always keep coming. The world today is interconnected and fraught with challenges that will wash over us. Some will just be little ripples that come and go on the breach. Others will be tsunamis.<\/p>\n

When armed thugs stormed the nation\u2019s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and threatened to hang Vice President Mike Pence, I started seriously thinking about the prospect of a second American civil war. Even though I am kama\u2018\u0101ina, I come from immigrant holocaust survivors, so those horrors are family memes.<\/p>\n

Could this really be happening in the United States?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cAssault on Fort Sanders,\u201d a depiction of a U.S. Civil War battle that took place in 1863. (Library of Congress)<\/p>\n

Being a frustrated optimist and an incurable scribbler, my musings in the dark days of Covid and Trump 1.0 led me to create a story coming out next February called \u201cThe Duck Springs Defiance: A Novel of the Next Civil War.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

My tale is set in the near future. It centers on a defrocked lawyer and ex-Marine escaping from an unhappy past. He is drawn into a quirky rural community in Washington state.<\/p>\n

His arrival coincides with a violent coup d\u2019\u00e9tat that throws America into conflict with armed militias and right-wing fanatics. The story depicts how his spirit is revived and how his adopted community successfully resists when attacked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While I hope my story is a very readable yarn, it is also a warning and raises the more cerebral issue of how likely an armed 1860s-style conflict actually might be. Are my familial and literary fears of another civil war overblown?<\/p>\n

Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n

In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security called virulent white supremacists the \u201cmost persistent and lethal threat in America.\u201d Several years later, 75% of all Americans thought armed insurrection was inevitable.<\/p>\n

A policy professor friend told me, \u201cIt\u2019s 1859 again. Everyone is angry, everyone is tribal, and everyone has a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

My \u201cdefiance\u201d story is a snapshot of one future scenario, but there are others, some of them more likely, and some of which could wash over Hawai\u02bbi.<\/p>\n

Scenario A: Diffuse\/Dispersed Rebellions<\/p>\n

In 1968, police violently clashed with demonstrators at Chicago\u2019s Democratic National Convention. When Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, protests and riots broke out in major cities.<\/p>\n

Political issues developed collaterally with cultural and generational changes in music, fashion and social mores. The \u201960s were angry years, in Hawai\u2018i as well. That could lie ahead again.<\/p>\n

Scenario B: Gray Zone Conflict<\/p>\n

\u201cGray zone warfare\u201d refers to a blurry middle space between kinetic conflict and peace. It can involve cyber fights, financial wars, espionage, sabotage and short outbreaks of violence.<\/p>\n

It resembles the \u201cTroubles\u201d in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1970s when the Tigers sought to create a new state called Tamil.<\/p>\n

Despite the violence, most Sri Lankans just went about their everyday lives. Would that be true here too?<\/p>\n

Scenario C: The Tide Turns<\/p>\n

The nervous tension between democracy and autocracy could lessen. Abatement could come from key electoral changes, from the rise of some new political coalition, or from repugnance over a killing incident like Kent State.<\/p>\n

It might emerge from a resurgent tolerance for immigrants and new immigration policies. Would a national turning land here?<\/p>\n

Scenario D: External Crisis<\/p>\n

External wars tend to divert us from internal problems, letting us rally together temporarily. The second Bush administration took us to war in Iraq in 2003 because of Saddam Hussein\u2019s brutal invasion of Kuwait during the first Bush administration and the allegation that he had weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

There were no WMDs, but for a time our attention was on a second Gulf War, not on our internal hatreds. Would our perennial Hawaiian internal divides lessen?<\/p>\n

Scenario E: Charismatic Bridge Builder<\/p>\n

Sometimes a unifier emerges. Think about Lech Wa\u0142\u0119sa in Poland, Gandhi in India, or even Jack Burns here.<\/p>\n

In South Africa, after 27 years of imprisonment, Nelson Mandela was elected president. He sought to unify a divided country but was deeply resented by Afrikaner whites and Zulus, each of whom thought they should be running the country.<\/p>\n

Mandela was diplomatically adept and politically savvy and avoided civil war. South Africa changed.<\/p>\n

The world is full of uncertainties and our \u201cfresh salad\u201d future remains impossible to predict. My future civil war story and the five scenarios above suggest possibilities. Though imperfect, scenario planning helps companies anticipate geopolitical curve-balls that can affect their businesses, assists corporate and government planners in providing outlooks to shareholders and constituents, and lets meteorologists prepare people for dangerous winds and waves.<\/p>\n

My cautionary tale is about a possible human hurricane. I pray it never happens.<\/p>\n

\"Civil<\/p>\n

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