A4 • The World • Monday, October 14,2013
Editorial Board Jeff Precourt, Publisher Larry Campbell, Executive Editor
Les Bowen, Digital Editor Ron Jackimowicz, News Editor
Opinion theworldlink.com/news/opinion
‘Red State’ America seceding? In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR. Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia. Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia.Yet a Europe that plunged straight to war after the last breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 this time only yawned. Let them go, all agreed. The spirit of secession, the desire of peoples to sever ties to nations to which they have belonged for generations, sometimes for centuries, and to seek out their own kind, is a spreading phenomenon. Scotland is moving toward a referendum on independence from England, three centuries after the Acts of Union. Catalonia pushes to be free of Madrid. Milanese and Venetians see themselves as a European people apart from Sicilians, Neapolitans and Romans. What are the forces pulling nations apart? PAT Ethnicity, culture, history BUCHANAN and language — but now also economics. And sepaColumnist ratist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States. While many Red State Americans are moving away from Blue State America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede. The five counties of Western Maryland — Garrett, Allegheny, Washington, Frederick and Carroll, which have more in common with West Virginia and wish to be rid of Baltimore and free of Annapolis, are talking secession. The issues driving secession in Maryland are gun control, high taxes, energy policy, homosexual marriage and immigration. Scott Strzelczyk, who lives in the town of Windsor in Carroll County and leads the Western Maryland Initiative, argues: “If you have a long list of grievances, and it’s been going on for decades, and you can’t get it resolved, ultimately [secession] is what you have to do.” And there is precedent. Four of our 50 states — Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, West Virginia — were born out of other states. Ten northern counties of Colorado are this November holding non-binding referenda to prepare a future secession from Denver and the creation of America’s 51st state. Nine of the 10 Colorado counties talking secession and a new state, writes Reid Wilson of the Washington Post — Cheyenne,Kit Carson, Logan, Morgan, Phillips, Sedgwick, Washington, Weld and Yuma — all gave more than 62 percent of their votes to Mitt Romney. Five of these 10 counties gave Romney more than 75 percent of their vote. Their issues with the Denver legislature: A new gun control law that triggered a voter recall of two Democratic state senators, state restrictions on oil exploration, and the Colorado legislature’s party-line vote in support of gay marriage. In California, which many have long believed should be split in two, the northern counties of Modoc and Siskyou on the Oregon border are talking succession — and then union in a new state called Jefferson. “California is essentially ungovernable in its present size,” says Mark Baird of the Jefferson Declaration Committee. Like the western Maryland and northern Colorado counties, the northern California counties are conservative, small town, rural, and have little in common with San Francisco or Los Angeles, or Sacramento, where Republicans hold not one statewide office and are outnumbered better than 2-1 in both houses of the state legislature. Folks on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, bordered by Wisconsin and the Great Lakes,which is connected to lower Michigan by a bridge, have long dreamed of a separate state called Superior. While the folks in western Maryland, northern Colorado, northern California and on the Upper Peninsula might be described as Red State secessionists, in Vermont the secessionists seem of the populist left. The Montpelier Manifesto of the Second Vermont Republic concludes: “Citizens, lend your names to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all down with it.” This sort of intemperate language may be found in Thomas Jefferson’s indictment of George III. If America does not get its fiscal house in order, and another Great Recession hits or our elites dragoon us into another imperial war, we will likely hear more of such talk.
Public Forum LNG plant won’t be good for community Boost Southwest Oregon signs have appeared in the community. These lobby members have one agenda, which is to push the building of a large gas plant in our earthquake/tsunami zone and an enormous pipeline on Oregonians’ private property using eminent domain. Veresen of Canada owns the terminal and half of the pipeline currently. No one knows who will ultimately own it or run it but a good guess is they won’t be American. Some jobs and money is the only reason anyone thinks this is a good idea. I get that, but refuse to find it acceptable logic. If built, this project is far too close to the community of North Bend, the mall, schools and airport. The ships would pass by a large population, too. Our earthquake/tsunami risk is 40 percent over the next 50 years. The odds increase as we move through that period, eventually reaching over 80 percent. It is ironic that our community tries to prepare for this event while business and political leaders welcome Jordan Cove. It is not moral to send fossil fuel all over this tired, hot planet in order to increase the gas price someone will get. It is not right to hurt the environment and expose Oregonians to unnecessary danger. We are seeing hired and elected leaders fail to keep us safe. Many have sworn to protect us. This blind belief that a gas project will secure our future is misguided. Such a facility and pipeline could very well make it impossible to recover from an event that is bound to happen. It could mean the unnec-
essary death of many. The risk is not equal to the reward. Boost Southwest Oregon is all about the reward and the folks who have joined it can no longer count on my patronage or political support. So, if you are a Booster, plant those signs out there and post your name on the website. It will inform the thousands who oppose the project of your agenda. It will tell us just what you value the most. Janice Williams North Bend
Memorial best on private property I write mainly to express my deep appreciation for Ray Straub’s letter of Oct. 7 (Move memorial to private property), which I think is perhaps the best you have published regarding the Mingus Park Vietnam War memorial controversy. To date, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has approved nearly five-dozen symbols representing religious belief (and non-belief) for inscription on headstones and columbarium niche covers in Arlington National Cemetery, about half of which are non-Christian. I wonder whether the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s complaint would have caused so much controversy had the memorial in Mingus Park been topped with, say, a Jewish hexagram, or a Wiccan pentacle, or an Atheist atom, instead of a Latin cross. But then, had it been topped with any such non-Christian symbols, would provision of a permanent site for it on city property even have been seriously considered in the first place?
Of course, topping a permanent monument on government property with a nonChristian symbol would be just as inappropriate as topping it with a Christian symbol. But on private property, as Mr. Straub suggested, there are no constitutional limits on religious favoritism or advocacy. Michael Gonsior Coos Bay
Competition: A great thing A big thank you to Fred Meyer for the new fuel station. What a great addition to the Bay Area. Gas prices are down at all area locations, thanks to you. Isn’t competition great? William Rush Coos Bay
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GOP has become the party of pain The GOP’s perspective on governing seems to have moved from enlightenment to medieval. It’s become the party of pain. Before I go on, let me salute some individual Republicans for standing up to the insanity within their party: Rep. Peter King of New York, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania. You represent the Republican Party of my father. For all their patriotic posturing, the tea party bomb throwers don’t like America very much. Worse, they don’t understand how democratic governments or economies work. Some of their political leaders do know but don’t care, using their electorate’s confusion to enrich themselves off their bankroller billionaires and right-wing media. There’s nothing to do about these voters. They won’t squawk until their own checks — for Medicare, Social Security, farm subsidies, roadwork — stop arriv-
ing. Tea party congressional districts tend to be poor, old, rural and on the receiving end. If anyone is a burden to p ro d u c t ive America, they FROMA are. And irony HARROP of ironies, by holding the Columnist federal budget ransom, they are making it hard for productive America to support them. And so Obama had to cancel a trip to Asia to baby-sit Republican tantrums in Washington. The financial and psychological damage of this shutdown keeps rising. The Republican Party’s staunchest allies — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers — are now tearing out their hair, demanding a stop to all this ignoramus talk about a debt
defaults being no big deal. “Our nation has never defaulted in the past, and failing to raise the debt limit in a timely fashion will seriously disrupt our fragile economy and have a ripple effect through the world,” wrote the president of NAM, nobody’s idea of a liberal. You have the formerly pragmatic Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina speculating that a default on government debt is a manageable situation. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has his nutty solution: spending piecemeal. If there’s not enough tax money coming in during a particular month, he says, we can decide what it gets spent on. Great, let’s have fistfights every month over whether North Cascades National Park can answer its email or not. America’s savers and investors, meanwhile, are given a choice of a kneecapping or punch in the stomach. It comes down to this: Either stock prices collapse now as a warning to Republicans that a
default would be catastrophic or they stay stable for the time being in the investors’ belief that Republicans aren’t crazy enough to let it happen. If investors’ belief in Republican sanity proves wrong, then they get whacked. One can distinguish less and less between irresponsible Republicans and the mature ones because the conscientious ones lack the guts or simple patriotism to stop the national wrecking crew within their party. We’re talking to you, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Looking forward to 2014, Republicans may have already lost their swing vote. And even districts packed with tea party discontents may not be so safe as they assume. Once it sinks in that their checks come from Washington and not from heaven, the hotheads will turn on a dime. They’re all about themselves. And please stop calling them “conservatives.”