Adapted from my September 29 preshow monologue.

This past weekend was a particularly tough one in the comment section here at TCF. I haven’t had a forty-eight-hour stretch where I was eviscerated quite as badly as I was, nor have I had a stretch where I blocked so many people.

Now, I’m made of stronger stuff. It didn’t destroy me. I can look at a couple dozen people ripping me apart, but then I can look at the thirty-some thousand who follow this channel and realize those people are a drop in the bucket.

However, it did remind me of how we treat each other, and how broken our society is, unfortunately, in so many ways.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe we can survive this way. Acting the way we act. Treating people the way we treat people.

There’s legitimate criticism and legitimate disagreement. And then there’s the whole idea of just ripping people apart for the sake of knowing you can.

So that’s been running through my brain. But also running through my brain is a show Beth and I have been watching.

We just entered the final season this weekend. It’s my third time through the show. It’s Beth’s first. I’ve been begging her for about two years to watch this thing with me, and she finally agreed.

The other day, she said, “I’m sorry it took you so long to convince me to watch this,” because it’s that good.

The show is the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

Those of you who are old like me know the original Battlestar Galactica from the seventies. It was very silly, very campy, in my opinion. It had some good messages, but it was typical seventies science fiction.

The reimagined one came along about twenty years ago, and it’s incredible. I think it’s one of the best shows ever produced. The character development is wonderful, and there are themes running through it that are complex and make you think.

But there’s a line in it that has had my attention ever since the first time I watched it. It has my attention now, especially with regard to how we treat people and how we are, I would argue, devolving as a society.

“All this has happened before and will happen again.”

Simple line.

The implication within the show is that the things they’re going through have happened in the past and will happen again. It’s the idea of humanity going in circles.

So, with that in mind, and with the way we’re acting as a society, treating people and ripping each other apart, I decided it was a good idea to take a little journey through history.

You tell me whether any of this sounds familiar.

Let’s start in 427 BC, in the Greek city-state of Corcyra. This was a time when restraint was actually considered disloyalty.

During the Peloponnesian War, Corcyra went into civil conflict between democratic and oligarchic factions. The struggle also became entangled with the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, and there were atrocities going on everywhere.

This was a breakdown of civic life. It wasn’t a permanent disappearance of the city itself.

Thucydides used the bloodshed there to examine what civil conflict was doing to the Greek world. He described a reversal of values.

Recklessness became courage. Moderation became weakness. People who were willing to consider another perspective became suspect.

Loyalty to a faction could suddenly outweigh family relationships. Even people trying to remain outside the struggle became targets because they refused to pick a side.

He wrote of suffering that had occurred before and would always occur as long as the nature of mankind remained the same.

His way of saying, “All this has happened before and will happen again.”

What I found chilling about his observations was that revenge had become more important than survival. The factions became so committed to hurting their opponents that protecting their own society became secondary.

The danger wasn’t simply that people became angry. It was that they started treating the person urging restraint as the enemy.

When someone says, “We shouldn’t do that to another human being,” and our first response is, “Whose side are you on?” what have we made loyalty mean at that point?

That’s what was happening then.

Let’s fast-forward a little bit and look at the Roman Republic. Not the Roman Empire. The Roman Republic, roughly 133 to 27 BC.

This was a time when fellow citizens became disposable.

Rome had expanding power, but its benefits and its wealth were distributed unevenly. The strain of governing conquered territories, the demands of military commitments, and the widening distance between prosperous and not-so-prosperous citizens contributed to civil unrest and conflict.

Rome’s power abroad didn’t protect its political system from breakdown at home. It had interests everywhere, but it couldn’t control what was happening right inside its own borders.

In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus was killed by a senatorial mob amid a confrontation over land reform and the breaking of political conventions.

That episode was more complicated than an innocent disagreement turning ugly. It involved constitutional limits, concentrated power, and genuine grievances.

But murder became a way of settling a political struggle.

Later, under a guy named Sulla, political killing became organized through proscriptions, which were public lists of people who could be killed.

Plutarch wrote about rewards for killing those named, confiscation of their property, and death penalties for people who sheltered them-even relatives.

So somebody could be on a list, and if you sheltered them, even as their spouse, their mother, or their father, you could also be killed.

Take a moment and consider what that meant.

Helping someone became punishable. Killing that person became profitable.

The Republic fell into further civil wars, culminating in the concentration of power under Octavian, who received the title Augustus around 27 BC.

Rome continued to exist. But its republican political order had given way to one-man dominance.

I think that’s important because we imagine the end of a republic as burning buildings and foreign soldiers conquering us. The fall of Rome’s Republic was different.

It taught that all can be lost while the buildings are still standing.

When protection under the rules starts depending on whose side you’re on, that’s when it’s all over.

Let’s fast-forward to more modern times and look at the Weimar Republic. This is when suffering became an opportunity for scapegoating.

The Weimar Republic faced the consequences of World War I, political violence, and severe economic crises. There’s a discussion to be had about how much the punishment imposed after World War I contributed to what came next, but that’s a discussion for another time.

During the Great Depression, unemployment and hardship deepened. Government austerity cut programs intended to help people. Economic suffering and distrust of the political system reinforced each other.

Politicians eventually brought Hitler into government, believing they could use his popularity and control him.

Instead, he turned around and destroyed the constitutional system.

This wasn’t only a problem of ugly words. People were suffering. Faith in institutions was weakening. Extremists offered enemies to blame.

We know the enemies they offered.

Nazi propaganda exploited existing antisemitism and other prejudices, encouraging hate. Under the dictatorship, propaganda helped prepare the public to accept increasingly violent measures.

Violence became the norm.

I think the Nazis showed us something incredibly dark: you don’t need every person in a society to become an enthusiastic persecutor.

A climate in which other people’s suffering no longer matters will suffice.

The danger is not only the person who wants his neighbor harmed. It’s also the person who decides his neighbor’s suffering isn’t his concern anymore.

Let’s get a little more recent.

Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when leaders dismantled the idea of a shared people. In my mind, this is one of the clearest examples of a country actually breaking apart.

Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics containing multiple ethnic and religious communities.

I know this one well because, when I was in the auto business, one of the mechanics at one of the dealerships I ran was a child when all this went down.

He was about twelve years old, in Bosnia, carrying a rifle to try to defend himself and his family.

During the late eighties and early nineties, economic and political crises weakened the central government. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described political leaders using nationalist rhetoric to undermine a shared identity and intensify mistrust between groups.

What followed were wars, expulsions, detention camps, and mass atrocities.

In Bosnia itself, more than 100,000 people were killed. Approximately two million were displaced.

That’s where the guy who worked for me comes in.

In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in an act of genocide.

The important lesson, in my mind, is not that these communities were somehow destined to hate each other. Political leaders and armed organizations made choices that transformed divisions into campaigns of exclusion and violence.

Responsibility doesn’t belong equally to every person in the affected populations.

The collapse of Yugoslavia, though, shows us an answer to this question:

What happens to a country when “our people” no longer means the people who share it with us, but only those who think, worship, or vote the same way we do?

With that history explored, I’d like to travel back just a little bit to Lincoln. Specifically, his second inaugural address, delivered as the Civil War was approaching its end.

Lincoln didn’t explain the war as a meaningless disagreement between equally valid positions. He explicitly identified slavery as its cause and described the effort to strengthen and perpetuate it as the reason the insurgents would tear apart the Union.

But he concluded his address by calling for charity, care for those harmed by the war, and a just peace.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

Lincoln taught a lesson there. He spoke of compassion AND moral conviction.

Not compassion INSTEAD OF moral conviction.

That’s a good lesson, and it leads me back to the line from the show Beth and I have been watching.

“All this has happened before and will happen again.”

I keep thinking about that, not because I believe our future has already been written, but because I wonder how often people help write a terrible future while telling themselves they’re saving their country.

I’m not asking you to stop believing what you believe. I’m not asking you to excuse wrongdoing.

I am asking whether we can still recognize an obligation to people we don’t like.

Does somebody have to agree with us before their grief matters?

Does a child have to belong to the right family before we care that the child is hungry?

Do we condemn cruelty because it’s cruel, or only when it’s aimed at our side?

Because I don’t want us to become so determined to defeat each other that we forget what we were supposed to be protecting.

All this has happened before.

But I want to hear that as a warning, not as an instruction.

And it leaves us with one final question.

What good is winning the argument about what a society should be if we destroy our ability to live together in it?

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