"Alarm Bell in the Night"

To add to Dr. Teresa Whitehurst's article I blogged about earlier this week, wondering if a kristallknacht was nigh, here's another article at TNR by Rochelle Gurstein, wondering if the Terri Schiavo incident in the Culture Wars is another step towards a 21st-Century Civil War. Perhaps the 'Culture Wars' are going to get more interesting than they've been heretofore. Was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing just an early harbinger?:

I couldn't get out of my mind a diagram from a history textbook that listed the causes of the Civil War next to a thermometer with the temperature rising until it reached the boiling point, from the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to the ominous decade of the 1850s--the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law; the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and the years of violence known as "Bleeding Kansas"; the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision; John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859; and finally, Lincoln's election in 1860. At every point, the people living through these conflicts did not recognize them as the fateful events that would lead them headlong into civil war. Will some true believer presently unknown to us violently take matters into his or her own hands so that he or she will one day occupy a similar place in history as John Brown? History, of course, never repeats itself, but I couldn't help wondering, are we now living through what, from the perspective of future generations, will turn out to have been another such fateful time?