NEW Speculative Fiction from Mission Media
"...a clear eyed assessment of where we are and where we are headed. . . An urgent and essential read for anyone who cares about the current state of affairs of the democratic experiment on this continent."
—Amazon Verified Purchase Review
About Confederate Dispatches
The timeline starts in 2024: An initiating conflict sets in motion events and rhetoric that foreshadow the birth of a new Confederacy. News and social media coalesce along partisan lines; narratives diverge to the point of mutual exclusion. A sense that political differences are irreconcilable becomes widespread and increasingly serves as an organizing principle within communities nationwide...
These “dispatches from the Confederacy” are works of the imagination, tightly written as they might appear as stories in a local newspaper of the 2030s. The twenty short pieces sketch life in a literal “two Americas” scenario, in which our country splits along its familiar red/blue divide but avoids another bloody Civil War. The new Confederacy will not be such a strange country: For many, it will be a disturbingly recognizable American landscape.
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OUR CIVIL DIVORCE: Why Confederate Dispatches Resonates
If you think political views drive division in America—not to mention within our families and friends, our workplaces and play spaces—you aren’t wrong.
According to the Pew Research Center*, political partisanship is the single largest factor in separating Americans from one another on a wide range of issues. One's party affiliation is more important than age, gender, race, location, education or any other demographic variable in determining Americans' strongest opinions.
America may not be destined for another Civil War, but is certainly engaged in a nasty and protracted "civil divorce."
Whether this is ultimately a good thing or not likely depends on whether your own minority positions will be greatly compounded by being held within "enemy territory." You might be uncomfortable as a conservative trapped in a liberal American Union, clustered along the coastlines of the present day USA; but would you be worse off as a liberal in the heart of the new Confederacy?
Confederate Dispatches gives a peek behind the wall for those who want to look inside a fully-realized "red state America." However plausible you think that peek might be, I believe we're all on course to find out for ourselves.
* See: In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp Divides in Both Partisan Coalitions
Images
Courtesy The New Richmond Leader
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