@Brisketexan, you aren’t wrong.
A WWII Veteran once told me a story about killing a German soldier with a bayonet when they ran into each other on foot, quite by accident, in the Ardenne forest. He told me the German was a boy his own age, and that sometimes he prayed for the boy and his family, but didn’t regret it because “that’s why I survived.”
For several years I’ve been arguing off and on that a second civil war isn’t some future scenario, but rather an ongoing reality that most of us are just waking up to. It is a civil Cold War that is very gradually warming up as intensity and violent episodes increase in frequency and magnitude.
It needs to be understood in those terms and contested in those terms. But we also need maintain the moral clarity to see who has the agency and understanding in this conflict, who doesn’t, and how those people got left behind. If we can’t tell the difference we give up any hope of a world worth living in when the dust settles.