Recently, while driving home on a rainy night, I saw a toad in the road. As I swerved to avoid it, I observed headlights from another car coming from the opposite direction. I feared for the toad, for all of the toads who hop across roads on rainy evenings, just doing what they always have done. I relate to the toad; l, too, am hopping along, seemingly oblivious to the oncoming traffic.

So now you are probably wondering what I think may flatten me on the road of life. Global warming? Another pandemic? There are so many possibilities. As a worrier, I often am concerned about oncoming traffic, but currently my anxiety is triggered by civil war.

In 2018 I wrote a column about inequality and the possibility of a civil war in this country, due to the widening gap between the political right and the political left (“United We Stand”). My thoughts of civil war were revived by the shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, apparently fueled by hatred of Black Americans. Soon after, the mass slaughter of children at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, occurred. I realized, when I heard that week’s news, that the war had already begun while I was hopping along, unaware of what was coming toward me.

Michelle Goldberg, in her opinion piece in the May 27 New York Times, “America May Be Broken Beyond Repair,” again nudged my civil war fears: “Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.” Wow. That statement feels so real to me. And I agree that Democrats, who talk about acting, seem powerless to do so.

Now, listening to the January 6 hearings on the radio, I realized that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were already engaged in a civil war during the January 2021 insurrection. I guess I’m slow on the uptake, if I’m just now aware that the war has begun. And yet we stagnate, as a country, as a people, allowing the split to grow wider, justifying our beliefs but doing little to listen to others, to bridge the gap.

In Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, the protagonist, Offred, talks about the slow shift of the United States from a democracy to a tightly controlled, misogynistic, hypocritical theocracy. She said, “Nothing changes instantly; in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

When I first read Atwood’s novel, this line struck me because I can imagine it happening, the slow cultural shifts that are ignored as potentially dangerous. I know that the United States has gone through rough times in the past, but I wonder. Can I tell the difference between a temporary rough time, like the protests and assassinations of the 1960s, or a serious rough time, such as a civil war? My grandparents left England in the 1930s because they foresaw the onset of World War II. Would I have their foresight?

This question is not as crazy as it sounds. A good friend of mine just moved to Portugal. Another is moving to Italy; he can obtain dual citizenship because his parents are Italian. One of his cousins has already moved there. Several people have contacted me for the email addresses of these people to learn how they, too, can leave. The person in Portugal belongs to a group of expats who communicate about the horrors occurring in the United States, like mass shootings. Do you realize that we are unique in the number of citizens killed each year by gun violence? Maybe we should say that guns don’t kill people, Americans do.

We are not protecting children or raising them in a safe environment. No wonder so many suffer from anxiety and depression. Many also suffer from PTSD, not only the ones who have survived gun violence in school, but also those in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago and Albuquerque and yes, New York, where violence on the streets occurs far too often. We apparently don’t care enough about children to do the difficult work of changing the system to support everyone, not just the rich or powerful.

To help children we need to accept that women know best when they are ready to start a family. The abortion rate has been declining in this country, most likely because of advancements in birth control. My overseas contacts started asking me to move when the Supreme Court leak about Roe v. Wade was announced. My friend in Portugal said that her European associates feel the United States is a place people are avoiding — unless they are coming from countries in far worse shape, like Latin America or Haiti. I have read more than one article about how it is time for The Handmaid’s Tale to be placed in the non-fiction aisle.

I do not want to leave my country. Yes, we have problems, but we also have incredible diversity and positive energy that I haven’t found elsewhere. As a baby boomer, I agree with the many people who feel it is time to eject leaders of my generation and elect a younger group of politicians who attack problems differently, possibly together, across the aisle. True, I do not see this happening any time soon, but something needs to give before the oncoming truck flattens us all.