Americans have sent a clear message with these petitions of secession, which have now come from angry citizens from all 50 states.
That message? We’re sore losers and we want everyone to know it.
A friend posed the idea that had Mitt Romney won the election, Democrats and liberals wouldn’t find this idea of breaking apart the United States so silly.
Well, maybe not. Personally, though, it would never cross my mind and never has, and I’ve come of age through two questionable George W. Bush presidencies. The country remained; still full of problems and promise.
Is that idea, shared by more than just myself, about respect for country? Was that a gesture toward rebuilding and unity after both elections? That seems to be the way the country functions. We all get riled up pre-election, say things we do and don’t mean, stew in our pity pot post-election and then move on.
We don’t threaten secession. We certainly don’t do it at a time when we’re fighting wars abroad, when we are dealing with domestic and foreign threats, and a sputtering but rebuilding economy.
To suggest secession is damn near treasonous. It might be ceremony and a lot of silly saber-rattling, but it’s a terrible message that weakens us on an international stage. More important, it weakens us internally, furthering the ideological divide in deep, even subliminal ways.
It’s understandable that people are having a hard time getting past a Romney loss. Obama’s re-election was no mandate despite what talking heads with limited vocabularies say. A 50 percent to 48 percent popular vote done mathematically right can mean an avalanche of electoral votes, but it is no decisive victory.
The point is, the election is over, and it’s time to play nice for the sake of the country, for the integrity of the republic and the system we hold so dear.
When did secession become something thrown around as an alternative? When did breaking apart the country become a rational weather vane for the winds of discontent? We are not at the point of revolution, and reasonable human beings cannot be convinced otherwise; history has already proven that’s how despots rise to power.
Secession talk is a joke. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, because there is no large committed population willing to die for this cause, to take up arms against their former neighbors to make this stick, or take secession to the voters or the Supreme Court.
The irony is the platform for these empty threats and hollow intentions have been provided by Obama himself. These petitions are being spread on “We the People,” the online crowdsourcing offshoot of whitehouse.gov, a feature introduced by the Obama administration in 2011.
What if in some alternate universe, the president simply threw up his hands and said, “All states who show that 85 percent of their residents want secession, have at it. Go ahead. Break away; be self-sustaining, self-policing and independent from the federal government in all ways”?
It would be utter chaos. States’ rights are sacred to the success of this republic, but the need for a federal government and its service to the people is still a binding thread. This is not pre-Civil War frontier America, where each state could conceivably operate as an island, where secession was not an act of hubris but a commitment of core beliefs and values.
States need the federal government, and it’s a symbiotic relationship. If you doubt this, a recent study showed that more than 65 percent of the red states — the states who pushed the initial rush of secession petitions — are among the 32 states that receive more federal funding than they pay in federal taxes. They are every bit of the welfare states that their representatives and citizens rail against.
Secession? Please. This is the United States of America. United. One president cannot change that; the ground we walk on is too firm. I wish we could all just deal with that, put on our big boy pants and work to move the nation forward rather than taking steps back with meaningless gestures.
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