Clearly, the time has come to consider partition. The country’s sectarian rivalry has grown too violent. Its regional cultures are too incompatible. The rage runs too deep.
I’m not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m talking about the United States.
Partition will be difficult, no doubt. Mapping the new borders will require an army of high-tech Masons and Dixons. But could it be any harder than collaborating on health care or retirement policy? I don’t think so.
I propose that we combine the 19 states that currently have two Democratic senators into a new country, composed of AR, CO, NM, CA, OR, WA, NY, PA, ND, MT, VA, MN, WI, IL, DE, MD, NJ, HI and RI.
Then we should turn the 16 states that have two Republican senators into a second country. Its members would include AZ, AK, NV, WY, ID, TX, KS, MS, AL, GA, SC, ME, OK, TN, UT and KY.
States with divided senate delegations could be cut in two, King Solomon-style. Each state could work out its internal partition on a county-by-county or perhaps township-by-township basis. That won’t take long. VT and CT, which each have one independent senator, could bore a tunnel under MA and form their own country.
We’ve tried to live in harmony. Folks, it’s not working.
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Half of our society believes that the rich exploit the poor and the other half believes the poor ride free. One half believes in public policy and the other wonders what that is. One half believes that Treasury bonds are safe. The other half believes they’re toilet tissue.
Partition, in a sense, is already here. The Republicans have seceded into a passive-aggressive snit, unified by the belief that next fall the voters will reward them just for saying no. The Democrats are too philosophically heterogeneous to unite behind anything big. They divide and conquer themselves.
Sure, partitions can be messy. When India was partitioned in 1948, a few million Hindu and Muslim lives were lost. And when Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt redrew the map of Eastern Europe at the Yalta Conference, the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians weren’t happy. But you can’t please everyone.
The borders of the two new countries look gerrymandered, I admit. But they won’t be any more convoluted than most of the school districts in my county. Smuggling could be an issue. Since the South is sure to abolish taxes, we can expect an epidemic of it. Speaking of epidemics, the free health care in the North will attract a lot of illegals.
Some of you may say secession is a bad idea, that we tried this once before. But that’s the beauty of it. Many of the legislators who refuse to recognize the Obama government come from same states that rejected Lincoln in 1860. We’ve learned from our mistakes and we’ll do it right this time.
The devil will be in the details. We’ll need to divvy up our warheads, reroute the natural gas pipelines and create new currencies. At this point we can only speculate about where President Gingrich will locate his new Sunbelt capital. But if we all work together, in a true spirit of cooperation, we can make partition work. Yes, we can.
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