A Gen Xer wonders: Can young voters stave off the calls to engage in political violence?
My Gen Z kids don’t want to fight, but many see it as inevitable

I’m online talking with my 20-year-old son, a hardcore tech nerd who lives for anime-themed music and holding court on Discord as Shogun of Flame. To my knowledge, he’s never sustained a violent thought for more than a moment.

We were having a peaceful chat. But when the conversation shifted to politics, things got darker. As far as he’s concerned, civil war is inevitable within the next decade.

“Believe whatever you want,” he says. “It doesn’t change anything. Violence is on the way.” This comes from somebody who’s far to the left of his extremely progressive mother.

His words are a frightening echo of what I’m hearing about the other side. One story I read recently quoted a young man armed with a rifle who got up at a right-wing gathering in western Idaho and asked when it would be time for him to start executing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he asked, drawing applause from the audience. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill those people?”

When I hear about the increasingly loud demands to solve problems with bloodshed, I’m flabbergasted and out of my depth. For most of my life, I’ve lived in a country that seemed to be staggering forward even if our progress has been uneven.

As a Gen Xer in her late 50s, I was raised at the tail end of the Civil Rights era and have grown up assuming that…