Remember that "Jesusland" map everyone was posting and/or emailing around a few days back? Yeah. That one. Well, after the election, more than a few blue-staters (yours truly included) were heard to muse about how the "blue states" seceding might just be the way to go. OK. We'd just lost an election that was important to us, but we were just kidding (mostly). We didn't expect people to take us seriously, but now it looks like a few people have done just that.
I usually don't read or link the "Moonie" Times, but I could n't help myself when I came across this.
The idea isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."
"Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California,' " said Lawrence O'Donnell, a veteran Democratic insider and now senior political analyst at MSNBC. "But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level of the red and blue states, the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'So what?' "
&hellip...The Internet has exploded with talk of a blue-state confederacy, including one screed circulating by e-mail that features a map of a new country called "American Coastopia" and proposes lopping off the Northeast, the West Coast and the upper Midwest to form a new country, away from the "rednecks in Oklahoma" and the "homophobic knuckle-draggers in Wyoming."
"We were all going to move to various other countries, but then we thought — why should WE move?" the anonymous message asks. "We hold our noses as we fly over you. We are sickened by the way you treat people that are different from you. The rest of the world despises America, and we don't want to be lumped in with you anymore."
The secession movement has already spawned commercial opportunism. One Web site is selling T-shirts that read "I seceded."
No one at the White House would comment on the calls for secession, but one top Republican official with ties to the Bush administration said the recent talk is not surprising, coming off an election in which the president received more than 59 million votes — the most in history.
I can't believe they called the White House on this one, but there it s.
Actually, when I think about it, I don't think it's such a bad idea. I mean, to use an analogy, if the relationship ship between the blue and red states were a marriage it would most definitely be an unhappy one, and perhaps even an abusive one at that. Would you recommend that two parties in an unhappy marriage—who seem to downright despise each other—stay togther just for the sake of staying together? Of course, not. Most people wouldn't. Why not part as amicably as possible now, before things get truly ugly?
Besides, there's legitimate reason on both sides. Those of us in the bluer regions have been called "arrogant" and "elitist" in the days following the election outcome. However, truth be known, it's also just as easy to apply that term to lots of people living in the red.
It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I'm sure they are — don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?
We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?
Who, indeed, is more elitist? You gotta wonder about those who are claiming the moral high-ground here, given their history.
The idea that Blue States are elitist for being intolerant of intolerance is mind-bogglingly dense. The only elitism in the Kerry campaign was a failure to address this distortion because they simply did not believe that a certain portion of the voting public is capable of rational thought. In all fairness, to some degree, they were right. But coupled with a fear of scaring off undecided voters, this allowed Bush to galvanize his other base (you know, the not-elitist one that thinks people who don’t practice their faith burn in hell for all eternity), and more than counteract the flood of new Democratic voters around the country.
Liberals: Get the hell over it. We, as a political body, are our ideas, our hopes, and the future of this country. There’s only way to get over the great ideological slump that we’ve fallen into: Admit that we’re right and work to convince voters. Thinking that your ideas are right isn’t elitism. Believing it’s not worth trying to convince others is.
While the endless parade of Cable TV pundits that have effectively destroyed rational discussion in this country drone on and on about the “liberal elite,” they let it be taken as a given that the “moral majority” in the red states are somehow not elitist. We have come to believe that people who think that the rich should pay lower taxes, gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married (even in other states… but otherwise they’re for states’ rights), that those who do not share their religious convictions are immoral—and who just 40 years ago were rioting over having to share the sidewalk with a Darkie—could never be accused of elitism. What could possibly be more elitist? Oh, that’s right. John Kerry getting a haircut. Yet, you can almost see those red states thumbing their noses: “So you’re too good to think everyone should be a white, straight Protestant. Oooh la la!”
Ya gotta admit the man has a point? Who wants to stick around and listen to stuff like this?
The truth is, America is not just broken--it is becoming irreparable. If you believe that recent years of uncivil behavior are burdensome, imagine the likelihood of a future in which all bizarre acts are the norm, and a government-booted foot stands permanently on your face.
That is why the unthinkable must become thinkable. If the so-called "Red States" (those that voted for George W. Bush) cannot be respected or at least tolerated by the "Blue States" (those that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry), then the most disparate of them must live apart--not by secession of the former (a majority), but by expulsion of the latter. Here is how to do it.
Having been amended only 17 times since 10 vital amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added at the republic's inception, the U.S. Constitution is not easily changed, primarily because so many states (75%, now 38 of 50) must agree. Yet, there are 38 states today that may be inclined to adopt, let us call it, a "Declaration of Expulsion," that is, a specific constitutional amendment to kick out the systemically troublesome states and those trending rapidly toward anti-American, if not outright subversive, behavior. The 12 states that must go: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. Only the remaining 38 states would retain the name, "United States of America." The 12 expelled mobs could call themselves the "Dirty Dozen," or individually keep their identity and go their separate ways, probably straight to Hell.
I can only imagine the response to a "declaration" of that sort bring something along the lines or "you can't fire me, because I quit!" But then I suppose the other side simply turn that around and make the same declaration in reverse.
I think what it comes down to is whether anybody wants to live in a country where their lives, beliefs, and values are constantly denigrated. Of course not. People in the blue states will say the red states do it to them. People in the red states will say that people in the blue states do it to them. And then there are the red individuals surrounded in blue, and the blue individuals surrounded by red; each living in enemy territory and reminded of it daily. The truth is, we're both doing it to each other, and neither intends on stopping until the other does, because the one who stops first may end up being pummeled unmercifully by the other.
So, why stay? Why not admit that we can't live together succesfully anymore, each get our own places, and move on? I wouldn't mind much, since I'm already living in a comforatbly blue area, and onlly plan to live in comfortably blue areas if I can help it. I have friends and family living in the red, but as long as I can get a passport to visit them once in a while, I'm OK with that.
OK, there would be some problems, admittedly. Like the couple who has to decide who gets to keep which jointly-purchased or jointly-owned items, we're going to have to fight over some things, and some things are going to get split down the middle; like the states that split almost evenly between Bush and Kerry in the last election. Who get's to keep Ohio? Who gets to keep Pennsylvania?
Forutnately, this may not be something we have to worry about. As one writer above said about the folks in the blue, "We, as a political body, are our ideas, our hopes, and the future of this country." And it turns out, "blue culture" may actually be winning the "culture wars" without even knowing it.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.
…It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.
So, if we "break up," so to speak, the truth is the blue states will still have plenty sell to red states. Push a few boundaries around in a few states, and people can simply vote with the feet and decide which side of the line they prefer.
So why not call it splits?
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