Don’t Secede, Just Move

Posted on Nov 14, 2012

Ken Lund (CC-BY-SA)

There is a growing and idiotic movement by people dissatisfied with American democracy in the form of President Obama’s re-election to secede from the union. I have a better idea: Just move.

Most Americans already hold to this maxim. Although some of us have become obsessed with national borders, the boundaries between the states are utterly porous. Except for minor limits on the transfer of vegetables, semi-legal drugs and pornography, Americans are free to roam.

It’s why one in 10 of us has elected to move to the promised land of California. We must be a sensible state, as so many Americans choose to live here. It’s certainly not by force.

Americans so hostile to their own nation that they would secede from it should simply move to a state such as South Carolina that has never really been too comfortable with reintegration. (I say this because it continues to fly the Confederate flag above the statehouse there.)

Let’s face facts: Obama styles himself after President Lincoln, and is unlikely to let the redder states simply walk away, even though they’re a financial drain on the rest of us and offer little in return. We don’t need a second Civil War, but those of us in the new Union will surely bomb your ass if you try to exit (personally, I say let them go).

So just leave the online petitioning business to those of us with serious concerns and move your trailer to Alabama, where you’ll probably be a lot happier and get more bang for your tax dollar, besides. There’s always Alaska, where they pay you oil money just to stick around. And if the U.S. is really so terrible, you could just self-deport to one of those cutthroat Ayn Randian utopias where survival is a matter of wits and cunning and superhuman will, like the Colombian jungle or Shenzhen. Just a thought.

—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer. Follow him on Twitter: @peesch.

—Posted by Peter Z. Scheer.

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