The map above is just a thought experiment, and I hope it’s accepted in that spirit. Just imagine the U.S. and all its citizens beamed up to the heaven of their choice, and then the ‘lower 48’ sinking into the sea. . . .
What kind of world would we then have? Would it be a better one, more or less? I’m afraid to say so but my answer would be yes. The problem is our crusading neoconservative/neoliberal imperialism, self-righteously championed by both our political parties and deep in our political bones. We have a lot of work to do before my answer would change.
Happy Fourth of July, and props to the hard-working and courageous people who made this a great country, an inspiration to freedom loving people from Touissant Loverture to Ho Chi Minh.
But I think we need to do a little thinking and thought-experimenting before we get back to the hard work of changing things.
P.S. Here are a couple of interesting things from Wikipedia on the Declaration of Independence, the first a contemporary criticism and the second a key revision:
We hold (they say) these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal. In what are they created equal? Is it in size, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these….That every man hath an unalienable right to liberty; and here the words, as it happens, are not nonsense, but they are not true: slaves there are in America, and where there are slaves, there liberty is alienated.
anonymous, August 1776, The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 46, pp. 403-404
Jefferson’s original draft included a denunciation of the slave trade (“He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”), which was later edited out by Congress…
[Also at my left wing.]
