> We really need to peacefully explore the "national divorce" idea again. In the 1860s the concept was too intermingled with the evil of slavery to be considered separately.

The idea is still just as intermingled with fundamental human rights, plus the sides are more deeply geographically intermingled than in the 1860s, largely because the victors decided not to really root out the evil they had defeated an instead allowed it to metastasize. There may be no peaceful resolution; there is certainly no possibility of a peaceful divorce.

Because this time, the Mason-Dixon line runs through our back yards and down our neighborhood streets.

The time to split the country was when the Confederacy seceded. We should have just let them go, but that would have meant ignoring a human-rights atrocity, and in any case it would have resulted in a shared border with a belligerent enemy nation and ultimately with a failed state. It's definitely too late now.

Slavery still is—and will always be—the issue. You think the Black populations of Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida want to be ruled by uncontested white supremacists?

It is the historical task of our species to abolish slavery. In every generation we've got to reeducate ourselves about its evils.