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One of the things I can’t quite wrap my head around is the strange civility that existed during the most brutal war in American history. The Civil War. I’m reading Grant’s memoirs. His stories of the pickets fascinate me. Pickets: forward troops posted between the armies, were close enough to see each other, sometimes even speak. And they did. They traded coffee, tobacco, newspapers. They shouted jokes. Confederate pickets even saluted Grant when he came close. They could’ve shot him. They would’ve been within their rights. But they didn’t. There was still something human between the lines. It reminds me that so many of them weren’t zealots. They were just caught in circumstances. Geographic, cultural, generational. Expected to pick up the rifle because of where they lived, not because they hated the man across from them. I’m not sure that kind of civility exists today. The digital age has become a kind of purity filter, amplifying only the loudest, most rigid voices. The people screaming about ideology today don’t want to trade rations. They want to see you erased. And they’d never salute a man they disagreed with, they’d try to ruin him. It’s hard to imagine such war happening again with grace. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Because once we lose the ability to see the humanity in our fellow countrymen, the abyss doesn’t look like a tragedy anymore, it looks like justice. So we’d do well to tread carefully. Because if we forget our shared humanity, we may not recognize the edge when we’re standing on it. Copied