God Bless The Indivisible Yet Continually Divided USA

O patria mia, how did you ever become the most biphasic Homeland on the map?

America is that one nation under God that continually keeps getting divided by politics and regional issues, only to keep uniting, then dividing, again. And again.

And yet, too many people seem to think this division is a brand new thing. Whether written on the editorial pages or broadcast over various media outlets, the consensus keeps echoing the same message. The current division — whether it’s from Doge slashing or immigration round-ups — is repeatedly defined as a once-in-a lifetime, never before aberration that’s ripping our country apart. Different Americans from different backgrounds keep reporting the same old tropes:

“Our country is divided now as never before!”

“America has never been so divided!”

“We’ve got to come together somehow before it’s too late!”

“This is no UNITED states anymore! Now we’re living in two separate countries!”

“What has happened to this country?”

To such remarks, I can only wonder if too many people fell asleep during history class or just never showed up in the first place.

Has no one ever heard of the Civil War? You know, that all-consuming, all-American war between the states…The Blue vs. The Gray. Yankee Doodles vs. Johnny Rebs. North vs. South. Remember when the Union and the Confederacy engaged in bloody warfare that lasted from 1861 to 1865?

Even if you weren’t alive back then, surely you must have heard about it in school, or read about it in history books or watched something about it on TV or at the movies…Well, either too many people have been skipping class or dozing off altogether. Or could it be that schools offered no information or no (gasp) American history classes at all? I’m not sure, dear readers, but my point here is that political ideologies and regional circumstances have always been around to divide Americans.

Even before the Civil War erupted, people and their legislators were fighting over which new states admitted to the Union would be free states or slave states.

That’s only one division in this indivisible nation, though.

Let’s not forget about the Western Expansion justified by the Manifest Destiny ideology. That mindset from the military and wealthy super patriots encouraged mistreatment and displacement of Native Americans. It also adversely affected others of Mexican.and Asian ethnicity who were only trying to live peacefully in Western and Southwestern America.

Then The Great Depression created such a divide between the haves and the have-nots that there are still Republicans in 21st Century America who insist FDR’s social programs were Unconstitutional. Even now, we still have a Republican Congress trying to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, WIC, SNAP, and any other government programs that help the little guys who don’t have enough money to stay healthy.

If that’s not a division, I don’t know what is.

Oh, what about Vietnam? Things got so divisive that after newly elected President Nixon saw a young girl holding a sign that read “Bring Us Together,” he made it his Presidential mantra. Too bad Watergate would end up dividing the country AGAIN. Then after Nixon resigned, Vice President Gerald Ford became President and pardoned all the young men who were “draft dodgers.” That action was either hailed as expected forgiveness by anti-war activists or denounced as unpatriotic by Vietnam Veterans and families whose loved ones died fighting for their country or returned forever scarred.

Remember when George W. Bush became President instead of Al Gore because the Supreme Court stopped the recount? Republicans deemed it a necessary step to ensure our democratic process while Democrats denounced it as Unconstitutional interference.

Then we had the usual divide that takes place after a Presidential candidate who wins the popular vote loses to the candidate who gets more votes in the electoral college. Who could forget the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. after Hillary Clinton “lost” to Donald J. Trump. (Who could forget the “pussy hats” of the marchers?)

Don’t get me started about the insurrection on January 6. 2021, when demonstrators invaded the Capitol to “fight like hell for their country.” Remember the noose assembled to hang Mike Pence? Remember all those guys calling “Nancy? Nancy?” Then some unnamed guy took a dump on her desk…

And yet, years later, these same demonstrators are seen as either patriots invoking their right to assemble and protest or as seditionists who staged an insurrection that amounted to treason. Quite a gap. Quite a division.

Now it’s June, 2025, and Donald Trump is President of The United States again at a time when the country is more divided than united. Remember, during this election in 2024, he won by only 1.5% — roughly 3 million votes by most accounts. Despite the reality that he squeaked into office with a small majority, he keeps claiming he enjoyed a “landslide victory.” Although the majority of Americans in numerous surveys disapprove of his current handling of practically everything, including Elon Musk and his Doge-gate fiasco, half of Americans still “like” him while the other half wants the gators of Mar a Lago to chase him away — far, far away from the Oval Office.

Although Trump’s character and performance inevitably fall into the rara avis category, the divisions surrounding him have always been around in America and always will. Because we’re also living in a nation of laws, though, we’ve always ended up in periods of detente. That is, Americans eventually slide into periods of tolerance when it comes to agreeing and disagreeing during these divisions. It’s just that now we have a convicted felon in the White House who keeps ignoring the Constitution and other laws and court decisions he doesn’t like. Kind of like what Andrew Jackson did, only in a more theatrical, more televised manner. So now the Zeitgeist feels more uncomfortably different than the other divisions have felt.

Whatever side of the issues you find yourself on, dear readers, know that our democracy has enough legal parameters so that we won’t completely self-destruct. We. will. survive.

So, please let’s end this ersatz lament about our country’s “great division that’s never ever happened before in America.” NEWSFLASH: IT has. Let’s read a few history books once in a while to get our bearings. Let’s start dealing with factual information about our own country. How about taking a break from Fox News to look at some other news reports?

Better yet, let’s ask the podcasts and the television networks to feature more historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin on their programs. That way we could learn something AND feel more at ease about our indivisible — yet divided — country.