Skip to main content

Welcome to North Colorado

By


Colorado like many states in the US is politically divided.  All one has to do is look at the election returns to the see the swathes of red and blue counties.  However, twelve northern counties voted this past Tuesday to secede from the rest of the state.  Eleven are contiguous and want to form their own separate state.  The 12th would either have to go solo or request to join Wyoming, as the Constitution forbids non-contiguous states.

This is not new.  As Michael Tomasky notes in his article.  Staten Island recently voted to secede from New York City, but it has been a long time since any of these secession bids have been approved.  West Virginia, I believe, is the last example of citizens splitting from their home state in 1861.  Their secession bid was approved in 1863, during the height of the Civil War.  Before, the thirteen original states gave up their western possessions, allowing for states like Kentucky and Tennessee to come into the Union.

Despite these precedents,  it is highly unlikely Congress will approve current efforts.  As for Coloradans, it seems they can't even agree on their motto.  The direct translation of Nil sin Numine is "Nothing without Providence," but apparently this isn't explicit enough, so a special investigation was made and it was determined that the original framers meant "Nothing without the Deity."

At the heart of these secession bids seems to be anti-immigration sentiments fueled by the Tea Party. It seems the teabaggers are coming to the realization that their bid for control of the Republican Party, much less the country, appears to be evaporating, and now they want to form their own white-only enclaves.  It's amazing they still want to remain in the Union.

It's not like these conservative counties don't already have semi-autonomous control of their affairs.  A lot of these remote places have become havens for survivalist groups, conservative religious sects and other right-wing element, loosely affiliated with the Tea Party, which have pretty much rejected federal and state government, often refusing to pay taxes.  But, apparently in Northeast Colorado (to be more geographically precise) they want to make a clean break.

In an effort of compromise, Tomasky noted that the Colorado state legislature is considering the idea of distributing senators evenly between counties, regardless of population.   This, of course, would lend much more weight to Republican counties, which dominate the state.  The legislators cite the U.S. Senate as a precedent, but apparently what is good for the goose is not good for the gander and state senates must be a fair representation of the population.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before such efforts picked up steam, given how deeply divided the country has become.  Democrats find themselves herded into metro areas in most states, with much more sparsely populated rural counties being heavily Republican.  If elections were a matter of land area, Republicans would dominate politics in America, as they control much of the farm belt.  Of course, the irony is that so many of these conservative farmers and ranchers rely heavily on state and federal subsidies, making them essentially wards of the state.

So, until these rural communities can truly attain the self-sufficiency they extol, they should quit trying to extort the government.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more