`Northern Ireland on fire" doesn't have the same ring as Mississippi Burning. But the same brutal tragedy is being played out among the supremacists of Northern Ireland today as in the southern US years ago.
Hatred of a future with justice and equality at its core seems a bridge too far for those who can't countenance change. Talking only to themselves, deluding each other about their capacity to take on the enemy - the world. An easy definition is that they are against anything, or anyone, that is not of themselves.
Their fear in that respect is palpable, begging the question: how can people deeming themselves superior be so frightened by the existence of those they believe to be inferior? The outcome is the same. Society - or at least part of it - is destabilised, and any sympathy for the supremacist cause is gone for ever.
Two sets of supremacists are flexing their muscles, and the implementation of political change, hatched through years of difficult political dialogue, is almost at an end. Hence the extremists' panic!
Implacable opposition has existed - some say prospered - during the tension of an implementation process. So far it has not succeeded in derailing the political process. As part of the new dispensation, laws have been passed which will not be repealed.
Some commentators suggest that the political opposition to the new dispensation does not want to collapse the process from which they receive substantial patronage. At least twice they have had the opportunity and refused to destroy it or set it back. Vocally, though, they maintain effective pressure to ensure the process is slowed.
That relative success is infectious among the population. Short catch-phrase tactics requiring long convoluted answers have enabled simplicity to succeed. Morality and purity of "the cause" are cited. The atmosphere is now driven inadequately by politicians infected by a souring they perceive among their supporters for the historic Belfast Agreement made between the two estranged traditions.
However, some of the souring may be due to the agreement's architects bitching and squabbling so much they have rocked the people's belief that it can ever work.
The supremacists see conspiracy at every turn, and that can quickly become an inclusive theory. Anyone who disagrees with them is branded as a conspirator. Then there are those who prefer to express their attitude or intention outside politics. They prefer violence. Attacks upon our citizens are a regular occurrence.
It is clear that many people felt a sense of loss when changes began to kick in, or "promises" failed to materialise. Perceptions like these engender a sense of defeat and are dangerous as a divided society tries to confront the reasons for generations of debilitating division.
As the pains of the division lie open, the capacity for some groups to claim community defence increases. This has included attacks on the "opposite community" or on those in the "tribe" who are considered evil conspirators.
Each side can manufacture justification from very little. The violent Irish nationalists claim moral guardianship of Irish freedom from a long tradition of armed struggle. The previous incumbents (the IRA) have entered the process, and now the pretenders claim, they are "selling out". The new mantle-carriers know that as long as unionist and loyalist opposition to the new deal frustrates implementation, they will seem inviting to wavering IRA volunteers. The loyalists' value judgments are tainted by more overt sectarianism than violent nationalists.
The "left-behind" loyalists say the ceasefire loyalists and liberal unionists are selling out. As the anti-peace nationalists become more strident, the oxygen for the "defenders" will increase. In this zero-sum society, both sets of extremists believe they are losing.
These groups, on both sides, are to a large degree masquerading, making real the old adage that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Drug-dealing, including cross-community drug-dealing, is on the increase. Each of the "moral guardians" is well into this and other nefarious efforts to amass personal wealth.
In any process of conflict transformation the risk factor must always include consideration of that human trait, played out in the battle, of visionary versus fundamentalist. The fundamentalists will always bite the ankles of the visionaries. Ask Mandela, de Klerk, Arafat, Barak or, more graphically, Yitzhak Rabin.
Those who cry "sell-out" can take comfort, in a cross-community sense, that at least they have each other. In a strange way, perhaps that will be the catalyst the pro-decent-future groups on both sides need to encourage them to be more reliant upon each other.
Predicting the future is not easy. Any deal which settles Northern Ireland down to normal life will be coloured much as the one on offer is. I contend that a process has begun that will relentlessly take us to where peace will happen. The question is will we do it now or have to wait until another generation, having learned an awful lesson from us, does what is in its own best interests?
Supremacists are losing the world over. Here? Well, it's only a matter of time.
David Ervine is leader of the Progressive Unionist Party