America is polarized, again.
This is significant because the aftermath of 9/11 and one nation drawing together after the attacks became as normal as partisan politics on Capitol Hill. Political foes worked with one another to ensure a changed, modified United States.
That’s exactly what happened: modification. The gray area vanished and the people took sides.
The New York Times reported a growing number of Americans support war in Iraq. In their latest poll, 55 percent of Americans support war in Iraq without United Nations approval. The percentage of Americans who want to give inspectors more time has fallen by 10 percent, and the percentage who want to take military action soon has climbed by 8 percent, according to the poll.
Political polarization heated up again back in December with a few comments given at a dinner party.
South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, a former DixieCrat, was retiring from the Senate and Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott gave him a compliment saying that Thurmond would have made a good president. Critics had a field day.
Less than a month later Washington Sen. Patty Murray eluded to the remarkable education to be had under terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Several senators, Democrat and Republican, star in the Civil War movie Gods and Generals. The significance is that some of them portrayed Confederate soldiers just after the Lott incident. West Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, a critic of Lott’s during the scandal, played a Confederate general, but he’s not vying for majority leader either.
In La Habra, Calif., a new form of line was drawn this past week.
The Whittier Daily News reported on Monday that anti-war protesters destroyed flags, flowers and symbols of patriotism at a 9/11 memorial.
This is the breaking of the old skin for Americans now.
They were not destroying the memory of 9/11 but the rise of polarization. The trench warfare on the home front for every judicial nominee and the religious fight for moral clarity has created a snake tearing away old for the new.
Miguel Estrada is a good example of this change. Estrada is a Honduran immigrant with a law degree from Harvard, who won 10 of 14 cases before the Supreme Court. Senate Democrats who have been the majority of those opposing his nomination have not drawn fire or accusations of discrimination. As Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer put it, Estrada is “ideologically moderate.”
Miguel Estrada is not the only one battling against polarization, he fights the tide with Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel in his new shoes of “just war” rationalization.
Wiesel, who said in normal circumstances he would join anti-war marchers, is now supporting President Bush in his fight against global terrorism.
Like Estrada, Wiesel is facing some criticism since his support for war. In an op-ed in the LA Times, Weisel, who did not even get top billing, has his support reaching mainstream media outlets. Wiesel’s case for war is based upon the “equivocation and procrastinations” of Hussein, not to mention his memory of how military intervention could have stopped bloodshed in the Balkans and Rwanda.
Rep. James Moran Jr. (D-Va) is now under fire from Jewish organizations for making comments considered anti-semitic by some.
On March 3, Moran said, “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.”
“The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should.”
The Elie Wiesels and Miguel Estradas will pave the way for the new polarization of justness in America. These gentlemen are the reluctant warriors who strive towards freedom in the eye of the confusion.

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