Empire

This morning I just finished reading a very interesting book. The title of the book is Empire, and it was written my Orson Scott Card, who is probably one of my favorite authors. The book takes place in the near future, in which the assassination of the US president becomes the catalyst for a full-blown civil war, with the division being between the liberal-progressives, and conservative ideologies.

Aside from being (in my humble opinion) a good story, the author raises some vary good points about the state of American politics. In the book's Afterward, Card explains the premise of the novel. The scary part is that he appears to be right.

One of the points he makes is that while conditions right now wouldn't necessarily start a civil war, he makes the point that the American political system has become so polarized that you essentially have to pic a "side" and stick to it completely, and that if you deviate even slightly or try to stay "moderate," you will be shunned by both sides. From what I have seen in the media, this much at least is true.

Another point is that civil wars begin when one side believe strongly enough that the other sie is arming them selves to destroy them that they shoot first. He even goes so far as to list examples like Yugoslavia where violent civil war broke out because both sides feared that the other side wanted to destroy them. Both sides claimed to be defending themselves and the truth was that they were.

The point Card made was that yes, it is possible. One of the messages Card tried to get across in the novel is that we are one nation, the United States, and yet we are so divided along ideological line that many of us wont even consider that fact that the other side might have a decent point to make. Card points out that that is one definition of Fanaticism. If that is the case, then I don't know about you, but I don't like that idea. I don't like it one bit.