Are We Practicing for Civil War in our Pajama Bottoms?

From 30,000 feet, you can see the Ten Commandments carved in marble on the courthouse steps, right next to the vape shop where the judge’s nephew sells delta-8 gummies shaped like cherubs.

Yesterday, I met a woman who swore she was vegan but you could smell McDonald’s cheeseburger on her breath like it was Chanel No. 5. Bless her heart, she just wanted the lettuce to count.

And the guy who rails online every morning about toxic masculinity still won’t let his wife touch the thermostat. The woman who posts daily about body positivity airbrushes her waist so far in her vacation photos she practically disappears into the sunset.

Meanwhile Joel Osteen kept Lakewood’s 16,000 seats closed during Hurricane Harvey, explaining the doors were “inaccessible.” The parking lot looked like a Chick-fil-A on Sunday—bone-dry, empty, holy in its own way. Jesus fed five thousand, but apparently keeping the carpets dry during a flood is the bigger miracle these days.

My neighbor’s yard has seventeen political signs and a bird feeder, because apparently birds don’t vote and that’s the only species she trusts anymore.

At the drum circle, the woman with “love wins” tattooed on her ankle told me she hopes Trump dies in a fire. She hit her djembe so hard the conch-shell guy had to shout about bad vibes echoing under a full moon, but nobody could hear him over the tambourine.

From thirty thousand feet it looks like we're running the same rehearsal script as 1858—smiling at neighbors in the morning, then gathering in our separate spaces at night to argue which of our fellow Americans deserve to die. I wonder if folks back then were doing exactly what we're doing now before 620,000 neighbors killed each other. When we call it "The Civil War," it gets to sound different like soldiers dying in battle, instead of neighbors murdering each other. Six hundred and twenty thousand dead Americans. The same people who had been sharing church pews and trading recipes and arguing about the weather just four years earlier.

Here in Florida there is a Bible-study group that prays for liberals to "get what they deserve," while the peace-and-light crowd shares memes about putting MAGA voters in reeducation camps. Everyone is so sure they're on the right side, they can't see they're all just picking sides for the same old script.

Before the civil war, the rehearsal happened in church pews and newspaper columns. Now it's hashtags and TikToks and block buttons. We are unfriending our way into separate realities, commenting our way toward the conclusion that the people next door aren't people anymore—just threats to democracy, threats to freedom, threats to everything we hold dear. The same neighbors who bring each other casseroles during hurricanes are quietly, digitally practicing for civil war.

And like every generation before us, we've convinced ourselves that this time violence will solve it. Only now, we're doing it in pajama pants, phones glowing while our kids sleep upstairs and our neighbors mow their lawns.

That's the part that chills me: how ordinary it feels. Ordinary people, slow-walking themselves into something extraordinary and terrible, the same way ordinary people always have.

But maybe we don’t have to keep practicing for war. Maybe we could trade the script for something else—take the casseroles and the kindness tattoos and actually mean them. Maybe if we laughed at our own contradictions instead of weaponizing them, we’d find our way back to being neighbors.

Turn the other cheek. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. If someone takes your coat, offer your cloak as well. Pray for those who spitefully use you.

If we could just try to mean it, to embody it, then when we fail, our contradictions could just be what they always were—absurd little jokes, worth a laugh, before we go back to trying again half the time.

At Whole Foods, a woman bought $200 of organic kale, grass-fed beef, and free-range kombucha, then screamed at the cashier for forgetting to double-bag her oat milk. Choose Kindness, her wrist tattoo read, pulsing above the register.

And my yoga teacher begins every class with “set your intention to release anger,” then spends the next forty minutes muttering about her ex-husband, her landlord, and people who don’t return their shopping carts.

The church marquee down the street flashes All Are Welcome while the doors stay locked to keep homeless people from using the bathroom. The pastor drives a Tesla with a “What Would Jesus Do?” bumper sticker, and I’m wondering if the question is about the Tesla conundrum we all now face – I mean we are all in that one together – and I think the answer is: He just walked everywhere.

Then I remember that the shortest verse in the whole Bible is, Jesus wept, and I wonder if He might also laugh with us?