Secede My Butt

Pardon me while I rant just the teeniest little bit.
This morning on my First Walk I took a photo of this:

for a fellow BookMoocher—I mooched James Michener’s Texas from her, and she made me laugh out loud by saying she’d try to get it in the mail quickly before Texas secedes and she has to pay international postage.
Hee.
But not. Not so funny at all when you realize these people are serious about this shit. There are people who really think it’s time to secede from the union. Oh, sure—many of them are just using the term to demonstrate their displeasure with The Way Things Are Going--but there are some, indeed, who are serious.
I want to find them all and slap them. They claim their displeasure is with the federal government and its dealing with the financial crisis and putting us further in debt and giving handouts and blah, blah, blah.
That’s bullshit. If that were what this was about, they’d have been pitching fits back in the 90’s, when the budget surplus Bush inherited from Clinton began the long slide into the deficit with which he left office. They’d have been yelling about the deregulation of well, pretty much everything. About how the rich were getting richer and richer while more and more of us—”us” being The Worker Drones—watched helplessly as our jobs vanished. They’d have been talking about seceding from a nation that thought, for far too long, that things were going pretty much OK.
Did they do any of that? Hell, no. But here they are now, with their TEA Parties and their silly outfits and their moronic signs. And that’s OK. They can do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t involve the rest of us. Meaning the signs and parties and costumes and speeches are a perfectly good way for them to spend their time.
What is NOT OK is that they’re being dishonest in their reasons for promoting secession. There is no way in hell that this is not because these backward yahoos have suddenly found themselves living in a nation with A Black President.
[Never mind that he’s as white as he is black. Never forget that.]
No. That doesn’t matter at all to them. To them, it’s still the One Drop Rule. One Drop Now, One Drop Forever. Ol’ George had such a catchy way with words.
And here’s what I say. If I didn’t live in and love Texas, the Texas of Molly Ivins and Ann Richards, the Texas of wide open spaces and the freedom to be a little bit different, back in the days before it became all conservative and religious and filled with thin-lipped tight-assed money-grubbing jerks who’ve been reaping the rewards of oil boom after oil boom, I’d say, “Fine. Let them secede.” Let them pull away from the US government and all the federal dollars and help and support, and let them heave a big sigh of freedom for the approximately 22 minutes they’d have before the waves of narcotraficantes washed across the southern border and set about transforming the New Republic of Texas into the new distribution hub for all the drugs North America can’t live without. Let them call on the US government for help , and let that government pick up the phone and say, “’Texas?’ I’m sorry. I don’t know anyone named ‘Texas.’”