Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

5/23/2026

Scary Thought for the Memorial Day Weekend: Memorial Day began as a tribute to the dead (700,000 or so according to the latest estimates) of the American Civil War. One major factor that made the Civil War take the form it did was the fact that the two sides formed more-or-less geographically contiguous blocks: the southern state were slave-owning states and the northern states were free, thus you had a war between the North and the South, today helpful shown on your map as blocks of blue or gray.

The divisions in the United States today are less geographically neat: making some very broad generalizations, we can say that we have cities and inner-ring suburbs that are politically liberal and vote Democratic while the exurbs and rural America are politically conservative and vote Republican, with the outer-ring suburbs being the (thus far) metaphorical political battleground. The national political map today shows an, overwhelmingly red America with blue dots spread like measles across it.

So the scary question: if conflict continues .does the fact that there is not a neat geographic distribution of red and blue America mean that civil war is impossible — or that when it comes it will be distributed, confused, and vicious?

Happy Memorial Day everyone, and enjoy the start of summer.