Secession!

I've been chewing on this since Monday...

Signed that petition to secede from the Union, yet? Well, good for you! Do you feel better now that you've done your little part, your cog in the machine to register your disdain for the establishment and strike the blow to divorce your sensibilities from the urban-centered, transnational progressives? Good for you!

Thinking of signing but haven't got around to it? Good. Now, Back.The.Fuck.Away.Before.It's.Too.Late! Do it. Do.It.Now.

Go ahead and call me a hypocrite to my more libertarian sensibilities. I too can't stand to look at where and how that deep blue, which seems to be dictating so much of our nation's path these days, is centered on electoral maps such as this:

2012 Election County-By-County

Having lived in Alaska for more than eighteen years (and, in love with the land for greater than thirty), I confess to chafing at some liberal nitwit from "Back East", who's never stepped foot on the tundra or into a southeast rainforest, trying to tell us how to be as a state. I'll take the scientific data collected by our more than capable Department of Fish & Game over some New York environmental lawyer any day.

Yeah, I too am fed-up and wonder if we wouldn't be better on our own. I have some problems with this concept of secession that's coming back into vogue:

First, this will not end well. No state will successfully secede and all that will have been accomplished will have been to have given the progs all the ammo they need to continue to discredit any opposition. What did the fucking birther movement actually accomplish folks? Come on, get serious and pick your battles carefully folks. Pyrrhic victories accomplish nothing.

Secondly, splitting ourselves will not solve the problems we face. I see this as the ultimate running away. A quitting of the job because you don't get along with some of your cubicle mates or a taking your toys and running home from the playground because you don't like the other kids. I appreciate that the issue is far more complex but consider it from the point of view of:

Stick it out and work it out!

I much prefer the Instapundit's view of:

Forget Secession, Try Federalism.

Third and, most importantly, we've been there before and the issue has been settled for the better part of 150 years. For better or worse, right or wrong. we once tore ourselves asunder in our formative years and out of this arose a nation whose ideal's, rights, and overall quality of life have been unrivaled throughout history.

This would not have come to be if we had completely broken apart into regional nation states. Seriously, think about Europe and its overall history.

I seriously don't care if you still see the Civil War as a war to free the slaves or a war of northern aggression. We tore ourselves apart, soaked our fields in our own blood, and still remain the United States of America.

Our union was formed and coalesced in the blood of our own and I will not see it go there again. Maybe this is disrespectful of me but I chose the photograph below very carefully.

Confederate dead behind the stone wall of Marye's Heights, Fredericksburg, Va., killed during the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 1863. Photographed by Capt. Andrew J. Russell. 111-B-514.

These were not genocidal Nazi SS, easily represented as monsters. These were our own and let us not disrespect the dead of either side by discussion the dissolution of our union any further.

On that note, I'll leave it off in the words of another.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. -Abraham Lincoln