On this anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, I was finally getting around to watching the highly regarded miniseries and my brain got thinking about the Soviet Union, probably once like America considered too big to fail.
But consider this. You ever wake up one day and realize your relationship is way past saving? That’s kinda where America is at right now.
The Soviet Union figured it out — after decades of trying to force a bunch of people who hated each other to live under one massive, rotting roof, they finally just said, “Screw it,” and went their separate ways. Now, 30+ years later, Lithuania has cool bars and Ukraine, well, they’ve got… other problems, but at least they’re running their own show.
Meanwhile, here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., the wheels are falling off, the Constitution is basically a nostalgic suggestion, and the people running this clown car are driving it straight off a cliff while blasting Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”
Let’s be real: half the country hates the other half. Not like “we disagree about tax policy” hate — I mean frothing, unhinged, “I hope you die screaming” levels of hate. So why the hell are we still pretending this is a functional union? Seriously. If marriage counselors saw America, they’d grab the kids and run.
The Constitution? That sacred, beautiful document we used to base this whole thing on? They wipe their asses with it now. Congress doesn’t give a damn. The courts play Calvinball with it. The Executive Branch pretty much does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and dares you to stop them. And the average American is just stuck in the middle, broke, pissed off, and wondering how eggs became a luxury item.
At this point, it feels like it’d be healthier for everybody to just split up. Let Texas be Texas. Let California be… whatever the hell California thinks it is. Florida can become its own reality show. Wyoming can turn into a giant survivalist camp. Fine. Better than pretending we have anything left in common besides hating the DMV.
And yeah, I know, some people start clutching their pearls at the word “secession” like it’s a racial slur. Calm down. I’m not talking about Fort Sumter 2.0. I’m talking about an adult, semi-civilized breakup. Like when the Soviet Union just shrugged and let 15 countries figure their shit out. Yeah, it was messy. Big deal. Divorce usually is. But at least they stopped pretending.
Because let’s be honest: the people in D.C. don’t give two shits about you. They don’t even pretend to hide it anymore. They print trillions of dollars we don’t have, light it on fire for their donor buddies, then tell you you’re the problem because you aren’t recycling your yogurt containers fast enough.
Meanwhile, your neighborhood’s falling apart, your job’s getting automated, and you’re one medical emergency away from moving into a van down by the river — and you’re supposed to believe we’re still all “in this together”?
Nah. Maybe it’s time for a controlled demolition. Not another civil war. Not chaos in the streets. Just… an honest conversation where we admit this isn’t working, shake hands, and let each region go be weird in its own way.
Otherwise, we’re just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship while the captain’s upstairs snorting coke and arguing about pronouns.
It’s not un-American to want a divorce. It’s un-American to sit around getting screwed over and pretending it’s fine because you’re scared of change.
The Soviet Union figured that out. Eventually. Maybe we should too. We aren’t better than they were. Not anymore. We might be worse.
it’s going to take some organizing by the people. Neither of the political parties want to have this conversation. They are both happy pushing more and more nationalism on us. The democrats are corporatists and cronyism in disguise. The republicans know that seceding from blue states would leave them with a bunch of states that don’t contribute nearly enough to the GDP to make a first world country. They tell their supporters to hate California, knowing how badly they need California.
so with two corporate owned political parties pretending they’re different from one another to keep us distracted from the fact we’ve long lost actual representation in government, it’s going to take a grassroots movement which I don’t see happening anytime soon. But I wonder how much further they can push us before it finally happens.