Every once in a while the curtain of history is pulled back ever so slightly to reveal a moment that people can point to and say “here’s where things turned” or “things were never the same” after a particular event. And while I hesitate to call the Schiavo case just such a moment, the great cultural divide between those who wish to save Terri and those who think her life should be ended is eerily reminiscent of another moment in history where Americans were bitterly divided and couldn’t imagine how the other side could possibly rationalize the position they took.

Radical abolitionist John Brown was perhaps the most polarizing figure in American history. Born in 1800, he spent a good deal of his life in debt due to bad business decisions and horrible luck. He sired 18 children, 7 of whom died before the age of 10. His first wife died in 1833 when he married a woman half his age. His strict Calvinist upbringing gave him a resiliency and passion that was to both serve the cause he so cherished as well as lead to his death on the gallows.

In 1855, Brown decided to join his three oldest sons in Kansas. The decision turned out to be a fateful one for Brown, his sons, and the nation. Before departing for Kansas, Brown consulted with several noted abolitionists including Frederick Douglass who had this to say about the man he called “Captain Brown:”

Though a white gentleman, he is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”

In Kansas, Brown joined other free staters in trying to counter the efforts of “Border Ruffians” from Missouri who were flooding the territory with pro-slavery forces in anticipation of a vote to determine whether Kansas would be a slave state or a free state. When the town of Lawrence, Kansas was sacked resulting in the death of two free state supporters, Brown’s son Owen said his father “went wild” and said “we’ll show those slavers they can’t take away our rights!”

A few days later at Pottawatomie Creek, Brown, his sons, and two others killed 5 pro-slavery settlers by hacking them to death with broadswords. Thanks to this gory deed and others, people all across the nation began referring to “Bleeding Kansas.”

Not content with stirring up trouble in Kansas, Brown hatched a plot to start a slave revolt in the South. With the assistance of several prominent Northern abolitionists, Brown and a cadre of a few dozen men descended on Harpers Ferry, Virginia where a lightly defended federal arsenal of muskets, shot, and powder could be had for the taking.

Brown’s plan was simple: Capture the arsenal and town, hold off any forces that could be brought against him by taking hostages and rallying nearby slaves to his cause, and then set off on a march through Virginia freeing slaves as he went until his “army” was able to cause a general revolt among the slaves throughout the South.

While most historians agree that Brown’s “plot” never had a ghost of a chance of succeeding, in the end he achieved more than he could possibly have imagined. Following the federal government’s suppression of Brown at Harpers Ferry, an extraordinary chasm opened up between North and South and for the first time, American’s began to look at each other across a sectional divide where each side saw a foreign country rather than brothers who shared a common history and culture.

It wasn’t the raid itself that generated this feeling, it was the reaction to it on each side that caused the South especially to rethink its role in the Union. The South saw Brown as a murderous brigand who wanted to encourage the slaves to murder their masters in their beds. The North saw Brown as something of a lunatic but whose “heart was in the right place.” Some even went so far as to make him out to be a martyr. This from the Springfield Republican:

“We can concieve of no event that could so deepen the moral hostility of the people of the free states to slavery as this execution. This is not because the acts of Brown are approved for they are not. It is because the nature and spirit of the man are seen to be great and noble…”

The last straw for the South may have been on the day John Brown was hanged. It was a day of mourning in churches all across the north as bells tolled solemnly and people went to church and prayed for the repose of Brown’s soul. The Southern attitude was one of astonishment. Here was a man who wanted to arm the slaves so that they could take their masters lives and he was being lionized by both the northern press and politicians. Jefferson Davis best summed up this attitude by saying Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry represented an attempt “by extensive combinations among the non slave holding states to levy war against Virginia and stigmatized the Republican party as one “organized on the basis of making war” against the South.

The gulf that has opened up today between Americans who believe that starving Terri Schiavo to death is wrong and those who believe it to be a tragic but necessary act has some parallels with the aftermath of the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry. Both sides believe they are in the right. Both are astonished at the other side’s lack of a moral compass. “Hypocrisy” cry those who wish Terri dead. “Callousness”scream the pro-Terri forces.

And more than that, it is the recognition that this huge divide exists not as some fancy political expression but as a living, breathing thing that has fueled the debate and turned it into into an “us versus them” cultural Armageddon. Both sides see the forces of darkness at work; people in favor of life seeing the “culture of death” in the ascendancy while the supporters who believe it was Terri’s wish to end her life see their opposition as “The American Taliban.”

The two sides couldn’t be farther apart. And looking across the divide at one another, each see strangers where they should see brothers and sisters.

It is a rift manufactured by forces that have been at work for more than 20 years. The religious right, marginalized for years by an ever increasing stridency in the leftist press and their ideological brethren in Hollywood, are feeling their oats after the reelection of George Bush and are making this case a litmus test for politicians. The left, after nearly 20 years of decline are desperate for power and see the case as a way to energize their base and scare middle of the road Americans (and libertarian Republicans) by proselytizing about the dangers of religious extremism.

It’s a recipe for disaster. At a time when external threats to our security are bigger than they’ve been in more than a generation, America is about ready to come apart at the seams. Can anything be done to waylay this threat to the very essence of our unity?

My hope is that the one tiny bright spot in this debate-the support of a few brave liberals who have spoken out in favor of life for Terri-will be the beginning of a search for common ground on many issues that divide right and left so bitterly. It’s up to us on the right to open this dialog by reaching out and finding some common themes that both sides can hang their hat on.

Otherwise, the cultural chasm that has opened before us could become a permanent fixture of the American political landscape.