This is a heartbreaking and terrifying article. I hope you'll read the whole thing. The essayist writes very well, about things that are foreign to many of us. He is a retired social worker now living in the rural south and working on a PhD.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/james-f-on-hatred-in-our-divided-...

I, too, am worried by our descent into prewar hatred. I had a friend from Dubrovnik in the’80s. She was a typical Yugoslav – half Croatian, quarter Serbian, and a quarter Russian. She was full of hope, smart, pretty, and heartbreakingly naïve. If she survived the war, I’m pretty sure my friend lost what made her a beautiful human being. She haunts me. Civil wars seem implausible until they start and then they follow the devil’s logic. People like my friend tend to die in them or turn into something less than they were in order to survive.