Friday, November 05, 2004

Blue State Secession, the Only Solution?

The maps are funny.

It occurs to me that, aside from frequent visits to Pittsburgh during my sojourn in Morgantown, WV, I've never spent much time in Blue America. I grew up in a suburb of Birmingham, AL, and went to college in Hattiesburg, MS and Morgantown. My parents have lived in (and I have visted them in) Tulsa, OK, and a suburb of Houston, TX. I don't even have any close relatives in Blue America. I have an aunt and some cousins in New Jersey and another aunt and cousins in Oregon, but I've had very little contact with them over the years.

In fact, I only have three close friends in Blue America (Sharon and her husband, in Pittsburgh, and Carlton in Boston [I may be being a bit bold by foisting Closeness on Carlton, but it is well intended]) and a handful of not-as-close friends in NYC. My favorite baseball team is part of Blue America, but is located, ironically, in the relatively conservative northern part of town.

BUT

It bears repeating (others have said this, I reckon) that while majorities (ranging from slim to wide) in Red America vote conservatively, there are loads of left of center folks in pockets throughout the country. Austin, Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Cleveland are all pretty Blue, but so are Houston (believe it or not) and Birmingham and Atlanta and Morgantown and Charleston (WV) and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill and so on and so on. Conversely, California and New York State are hardly uniformly liberal, and yet and yet and yet.

The Electoral College is simply indefensible (he says, sort of out of nowhere). That was clear in 2000, when the greater of two evils won using it, but it is equally clear now, when he actually won the popular vote by a fairly large margin (don't bother trying to spin it unless you can honestly say you never said something like "but Gore actually had over 500,000 more votes!").

I reckon that should be one of the fights we need to fight.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home