For many years now, we conservatives have had the impression that our nation is fragmenting.  Day by day, more signs of this disintegration accumulate.  Throughout it all, many of us had hoped that the fragmentation could be reversed.  We tried to persuade ourselves that our republic would prove resistant to unconstitutional ideas, and that the American people would come to their senses and reunite, before irreversible catastrophe occurred.

That hope seems to be quickly vanishing.

Two items in the news are of special interest.  One of them is that protesters are conducting marches against sharia law. 

The other involves a young woman named Reality Winner, who has been arrested and jailed on charges of stealing and publishing secret government documents that purport to link Russia to election hacking.  Winner's motive seems linked to the fact that she has been publicly opposed to the Trump presidency – so much so as to have advocated destroying the White House.

These news items are only two of the latest, among the many examples of the increasingly rancorous divide in American politics.

The march against sharia law is predictably being characterized by the left as an example of right-wing racism and intolerance.  (One wonders, when will the left march against Islamic homophobia?) 

However, the fear of sharia law is not entirely imaginary.  There is a recurring effort by Muslims to institute it.  And there are other ways in which Muslims segregate themselves from the rest of society.  Most recently, this has taken the form of demanding that the government provide Muslims with "safe spaces."  The spaces would shield them from surveillance so that they could – and the Muslims specify this – say things they otherwise could not say in the open.

What, pray tell, are they afraid to say in the open, that radicals of both the right and left are not already saying?  Burn down the White House?  Murder homosexuals? 

My lifelong optimism for America is being challenged by the divisiveness in our society.  Once the mighty boulder is cleft, there is no way to return it to its former state.

Not only did the American Revolution give us a war against the British Empire, but it also pitted Americans against each other, Tory versus Patriot.

A second American Civil War would be bloody and destructive on a scale none of us has seen in our lifetime within these borders.  Even so, a Second American Revolution may be unavoidable.  Constitutional government may require it.