So About This Whole Secession Thing...

As we all know, I'm from Alabama. People tend to associate my state with that time we kind of bailed on the country along with our Southern brethren and were thing dragged kicking and screaming back into the Union. It turns out some savvy folks are up to these shenanigans again: Residents of 40 states have started petitions to secede from the United States in the aftermath of President Obama's reelection.

Talk about being a sore loser.

I wasn't planning to comment on this, because I think it's stupid. Then people started a reactionary petition to deport the would-be secessionists.And so the cycle is established.

Now, I'll be perfectly honest. In the sense that sometimes I think about things that are completely unrealistic, I'm not inherently against the idea of secession. But that's mostly because I love the South and it grosses me out that the rest of the country doesn't really believe in having sugar in their iced tea. But then, you know, I consider the fact that I am not living in my fantasy land where Ryan Gosling is desperate to win my love and Entertainment Weekly is just begging me to work for them and Gary Johnson won the election last week. I am, in fact, living in the real world, where Barack Obama, though I did not vote for him, is my president and Mitt Romney, though I did not vote for him, was a legitimate contender for the presidency and I have to deal with the fact that I don't always get what I want. I think we call that phenomenon of not throwing tantrums over things like functional* democracy maturity or something?

While this makes for a nice joke (for those of us who don't take it seriously, at least), talking about it is a waste of time. And I realize I'm therefore wasting time by even bothering to explain that, but oh well. I'm masquerading as a critic of a culture, not a proper member of the Fourth Estate. The bottom line is we have actual important things to talk about (like drone strikes and unemployment and Taylor Swift's subtle sexual liberation movement). Let's have those conversations instead, shall we?



*Yes, we could argue over how functional our democratic republic really is and whether the electoral college is legitimate and all kinds of fun stuff, but seeing as Obama did win both the popular and electoral votes, let's do that some other time, mmkay?