Charlie Kirk was asked recently, at one of his lectures, whether now is a good time to "use the guns."  He answered that it isn't, and I agree with him but only partially for the reasons he stated.

Simply put, the idea that right-wingers could start a revolution and win one, at this point in history, is comedy — and no, I don't care if that's the sole reason we have a Second Amendment and we have more AR-15s.  First off, we don't own any of the institutions — including any branches of the military, which, although staffed with lots of great and respectable men, are currently run by woman-drafters, white-shamers, and tranny-loving butt-kissers. 

I would add to this that social and big media are owned almost entirely by the left wing, which means we have no platform to mass-communicate.  Do we run the CIA, or the FBI, or any national organization built to maintain law and order in a crisis?  No — all of it is in possession of the left wing, which gives leftists a clear advantage in organization and persecution. 

More importantly, I would posit that these United States are so completely interdependent that any kind of real split, even without bloodshed, would result in mass starvation and eventually death.  This isn't the 1860s, when clothes could be homespun and farms were all family-owned.  There isn't a single business in these states that maintains its existence within a single state: everyone is dependent on other businesses in other states, and many times in other countries, to supply what he needs to function on even a basic level.

Consider then the national corporations, where so many Americans are employed, each of them necessarily based in a single state.  Cut off the head, and suddenly you're left with a bunch of dead limbs — Walmart, Amazon, Applebees, Target, Tesla, Boeing, Chevrolet, etc. — companies that, in the event of a war, would immediately cease to function cross-country are oftentimes dependent on one another, and would immediately throw a hundred million out of work, if not more.  And I haven't mentioned agribusiness here, or Big Pharma, or all the thousands of companies that make computer chips and innumerable widgets that none of us knows about but we're extremely dependent upon.  

This isn't even considering water sources and power grids, two things that have the potential to wreck life as we know it and send whole regions into anarchy and the Stone Age.  Where are the power plants?  The transmission lines?  What are the sources of power — dams, or coal, or solar, or nuclear?  Idaho Power is only one company, and it powers large parts of Oregon.  Who powers the others?   What do we do if credit cards won't work?  And what about banks in general?  How do we get gas to the gas stations — and know if they'll be able to pump gas anyway without electricity?  And who will own and run the phone towers?  The right-wing yahoo claims to love free enterprise so much — could he have forgotten how businesses work, and where?  

What we would be talking about, assuming that any kind of civil war were to get underway, is a drastic shift in living standards that would require, upon the start of things, a strong central government, ready to provide the basic necessities and put millions of people to work immediately — a kind of government typically known as "war fascism," which is the type of government our hotheads (and especially the libertarians) are worst at, and to which at bottom they're morally opposed.

So I urge them to give their "dream" up.  The answer to American differences, at least for the foreseeable future, will never be civil war.  And in fact, I don't believe that many right-wingers think it is.  But I'm tired of the poorly thought out, unserious moralistic responses to the hotheads — who require a firm no, as all yahoos do, and not the namby-pamby suit-and-tie "violence is not the answer" non-answers they've been getting.

In the meantime, I would advise them to consider the observation of Tolstoy in Anna Karenina:

There are people who when they meet a rival, no matter in what, at once shut their eyes to everything good in him and see only the bad. There are others who on the contrary try to discern in a lucky rival the qualities which have enabled him to succeed, and with aching hearts seek only the good in him.

So take the latter route.  See how the liberals crush us in everything we call silly — which is actually important.  Stay armed and informed, but go into acting, writing, singing, and teaching.  In other words, make a dent on the culture of the nation, and try for once to be interesting instead of just winning a bunch of arguments.  Life, after all, is passed on through things as embarrassing as sex — and never through lectures.  

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter, and Facebook.

Image via Max Pixel.