It's not a civil war but a nation divided

CIVIL War, screamed the cover of the New York Post, the Murdoch-owned tabloid on July 7, in the aftermath of the shooting of 11 police officers by a lone gunman in Dallas, Texas, a day earlier. Like in the case of the huge headline carried by The Washington Post, Hell in Dallas, the old-fashioned print media as well as the more cool social media, were trying to capture the sad, horrified, anguished - pick your adjective - mood of America in the very hot summer of 2016 that has been boiling with anger and hate, as deteriorating race relations coupled with one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in American history threatened to create a deadly national schism.

Against the backdrop of rising political turmoil and images of death and destruction, some veteran observers recalled the 1960s, another period in American history when the nation went through years of racial tensions and political violence, when relations between blacks and whites resulted in violent protests in the inner cities of Washington DC, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago where entire neighbourhoods were burnt down; when protests by students against the Vietnam War and the entire establishment shook the political foundations of the country; when three leading public figures - president John Kennedy, senator Robert Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr - were gunned down by political assassins.

There is no doubt that the United States has come a long way from those times when the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination against other minorities, women and gays was only starting to take shape. After all, in what would have been considered the figments of the imagination of a creative science fiction writer, Americans elected and re-elected the first African-American president, are probably on the verge of electing the first female president and have legalised same-sex marriage.