Civil War?

Splitting the Country

Thanks to several of you who expressed interest in my Civil War musings about breaking up the United States.

First, let me apologize for taking so long to get back to the computer. Both my personal condition, and that of the country have been so hard for me to digest that I just haven’t been able even to try. As I sit here at the keyboard, I realize how much I have missed it. At any rate, back to the subject at hand.

The two most important aims on my list are control of population and individual opportunity. I’m speaking here of the United States, but the needs of the whole world are hovering over all of us.

First of all, God, if there is one, has some really superb methods for coping: disease, starvation, suicide, murder, warfare, natural catastrophe, etc., etc. One would think that those who pray, especially, would get the message, but somehow they have gotten it all backwards (keep them alive at all costs, no matter how much they beg to be let go). As Shakespeare once said, “examples gross as Earth exhort us!” Instead, the human animal is well on the way to suffocating us to death by sheer numbers alone.

And you may be lucky enough to enjoy a comfy carefree life, but try taking a look at pictures of those at the other end of the scale, even here in the Land of the Free. The only REAL help for those at the bottom is Education—rather than charity. The road to freedom is very long and steep, the end of which most of them will never see.

As for what we might do to get a start on things in this country, the growing rifts between the states, one with another, seem to center more and more on religion. Religion’s shadow hovers ever darker over the freedoms of non-believers, even in Congress and the laws of the nation. At the same time, the True Believers call ever more stridently for control and removal of the two most effective reins on human error—birth control and the right to die.

Wonderful as this country may be, it has one serious flaw which has won its way into our most cherished beliefs—the right to become very rich. Some of the richest, luckily, have spent their lives helping—really helping—others. Unfortunately, the lucky levels below the very rich are more inclined to wallow in their own good luck. And on a level below these is the level of the real saints, many of them choosing to ignore wealth, and self-taught the values of their own personal religions, who devote their lives to the needs of those below them on the scale of life.

For the time being, it seems to me that we should have an election in which the citizens should have the right to choose to align themselves with other states in order to give each other support, though not to attack those states with very different views and needs. These alliances might become mini- nations, independent of other mini-nations. I do know that many of us who are atheists (heathen to many of the rest of you) find our nation’s laws becoming more onerous and ill-conceived. We owe you the privilege of your beliefs, but at the same time, we claim our right to live by ours. If you want to bring a deformed baby into this world at the expense of his chance of a miserable and painful life, and if you want to force an extremely ill or injured man to continue to live out his misfortune, please make those decisions for your own, and do not force your religious beliefs on the rest of us.

To sum it all up, there is too much of this going on in this country right now. That is why I suggest that the States vote on how they want to proceed—all together, in smaller groups, or separate and different alliances (or countries) beholden to those we choose, but not to those with whom we disagree.


P.S. It feels so good to be back, regardless of any response.

Love you all,
LittleBill

ARW 6/7/10