The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

He worried about what’s going to happen when the Second Amendment falls, which he viewed as likely, perhaps soon, and the government comes for their arms. “We have a gun in the truck and guns in the house and the kids know how to use them,” he explained. Mom and Dad owned roughly thirty-five between them. Dad was thirty-six years old. The older he got, he said, the angrier he became about abortion. He said it’s the second most important issue—after guns. He spoke of a singular picture he couldn’t get out of his mind, although there seemed to be many. Government knocking on his door, demanding his weapons, and the question that haunted him of what he’ll do then (“I won’t be handing them in, that’s for sure”); and boys dressed as girls and girls dressed as boys and furries—“kids who identify as animals”—and litter boxes for such creatures in schools, which don’t exist but had become a piece of permanent fascist folklore since a clip of a Nebraska state lawmaker lamenting the practice went viral. (“How is this sanitary?” the legislator demanded.) But the worst picture—the killing picture—was of an abortion. An imaginary one. “When I picture these doctors, sticking wires in their—crap—and—literally cutting their arms off, so they bleed to death?” He spoke with White-man vocal fry: “Killing the chunks? Throwing them in a garbage can?” And White-man fury: “I tell you what. Put that doctor in front of me—I’ll do the same to him.”