We can’t just let them secede.
It would be nice, it would be easy, it would be a great relief to drop about 15 states of dead weight and go back to being a hard-charging up-and-coming country with a dynamic future, unencumbered by the sclerosis of the Hookworm Belt.
But we can’t do it.
If you want to know why, look at the recent publicity for suicides among gay teens. Dan Savage is out promoting his “It Gets Better” campaign, which is fine as it goes, and a pretty good message for almost any teen – but what if it doesn’t? What if a kid’s stuck in a rural town, with average grades, and going off to college is only going to put him a hundred miles from home and among the same sorts of people? And what if it’s not just a question of being gay? What if it’s being some other color, or having the wrong accent, or just plain being different?
We assume people could just get away if they wanted to – probably because most of us reading this (certainly those of us writing it) are well off, healthy, “free white and twenty-one” as the saying used to go. And with all those advantages, it still took me until graduate school to break out of the metro area – and another three years to break out of the South. How, then, are we to identify and rescue every single prisoner of the cult of conformity – especially once we’ve allowed said cult to form its own country? Especially if they’re ready, willing, and able to decide that who you are as a person is against the law?
No retreat. No surrender. No punting. No throwing out hands in the air and letting them go. We stay, and we fight, and we win. And you can paint that right on the bottom of the flag: “not for ourselves alone.”