David Swanson (born 1969) is an American activist, blogger and author. He currently resides in Virginia.
Imagine Jon Stewart if he gave a damn. He's like Howard Zinn after 12 beers.
California as a nation or part of a larger West Coast nation, should other states join with California, would be a good influence on the rest of the United States.
Slavery remained in the Deep South by other names - in prison programs with charges over nothing and eternal debt that threatened every African-American in the South right up through World War II. And that was after killing three-quarters of a million people, destroying cities, and creating hostility that exists to this day over the the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes, all brewing out of bitterness over a war that didn't have to happen.
The Pentagon is supposed to be under civilian control and it ought to be up to the people of the United States, not the profiteers.
The United States is a rogue state violating international law in many, many ways that California wouldn't have to if it seceded and became a nation.
I think almost everything important that's ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened. Good things and bad things: ending slavery, ending child labor, women voting, etc.
I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.
Climate change is so unimaginable that most Americans deny it's happening.
Activism has always been the driving force for change.
If we think that we can somehow gain control of the US government, bring it under popular, enlightened progressive control, preserve a habitable climate, and rein in the dangers of nuclear and other warfare, then we should. However, if we think it's more likely that California can achieve those goals by secession, then we should go down that path. There's no question. It's an absolute moral imperative.
Breaking the United States up into a number of pieces could be very good for the integration of those new nations with the rest of the world and the international law whose primary enemy is now the United States government. I think that it would be very good for democracy, for people to be within some hundreds of miles of their nation's capital, as they are in many other countries, so that they didn't have to travel thousands of miles to protest, to exercise their First Amendment rights, but that is the current state of affairs in this overly large, imperial nation.
Many militarists would like to see California's votes vanish from the national electoral system, which would then become more Republican.
I think it's more likely that we can make positive changes happen on environment and military issues if states begin to secede. I don't think it's question of personal lifestyle preference or some sort of parochial identification with your state. I think it's an absolute moral demand that something be done to create a government with some power that can be controlled by the residents of its territory. That was supposedly the idea in creating the United States, but it doesn't exist now and we have to make it exist even if it's piece by piece, part of the United States at a time.
California, like anywhere else on Earth, should have the right to secede whether the United States likes it or not. The preferences of the other 49 states and Washington DC is not relevant. That was the position of the United States government on Yugoslavia and other places around the world but not on Ukraine. However, morality and the law as I understand it are that any people should have the right to leave, just as explained in the initial words of the US Declaration of Independence.
The United States has been becoming worse year after year after year for decades, and it's guaranteed to continue down that path if we don't change something.
I'm not convinced that the people of Arizona as a nation couldn't do better to protect equal rights for all than the people of Arizona as part of the United States, which is actually not helping them much.
No other nation killed people the way the United States did to end slavery.
I think the election of Donald Trump, if you want to call it an election, was unimaginable to most people, which is part of how it happened.