The Scatter-Shot States of America

The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock four hundred and three years ago we are told.  And those Puritans risked all to escape from the England of religious persecution.  Now it may be that the persecution was based on the annoyingness of the Puritans.  We won’t debate that.  Suffice it to say they wanted a place of their own where they were free; free to persecute unto death, whomever they chose, in peace.

And they succeeded fabulously.  From humble beginnings they spread across the continent and now in every jurisdiction where they were overrepresented; New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Great Lakes Region and the Pacific Coast they torture anyone who disagrees with their whims.  And they have even set up a coalition that allows them to torture the other areas of the United States by means of federal legislation and executive branch administrative rulings.  They are indeed very organized and very effective at making other people miserable.  It is their whole reason for existence.

And yet, even now as rioting and thuggery turn the streets of once great metropolises into anarchic hellscapes, the greater part of the geographic area of the United States is still a wonderland of modern life.  For the most part we have the advantages of the electric age where appliances and machines provide us with multiples of a horsepower at our fingertips to do everything from transport us to a job located a week’s walk from our home to cutting up a fallen tree in a tiny fraction of the time it would take us with a hand saw.  We heat our homes and cool them using chemical energy derived from carbon-based fuels and we eat food that is kept sanitary by refrigeration.

Now undoubtedly things have begun to degrade.  The electric grid crashes enormously more often than it did even twenty years ago.  The powers that be want a lot of this cheap and convenient power to go away.  But even now with infrastructure degrading around us, our lives are immeasurably easier than our ancestors living a hundred and fifty years ago.  As galling as are all of the lies we are told about why our standard of living has to be lowered, it’s probably true that even after they take away fossil fuels from most of us, the United States will still be more pleasant a home than the majority of the rest of the planet.

One can only imagine what it would be like, living in the Congo or Egypt or Pakistan.  Even Mexico or Brazil would be many times less safe or comfortable.  So maybe leaving here would not make sense.  Maybe we cannot be modern day pilgrims leaving the place of bondage for a land of opportunity.  Unless we can find that promised land right here in the United States.

As much as the busybody Puritans use every power at their disposal to rule over us, maybe we can undermine their control locally and even regionally.  And with the modern abilities to network and organize people across great distances maybe we can produce coalitions of our own and pool resource and regain a large part of the control over our lives that the Puritans have taken away.

For instance, Joe Biden attempted to instate regulations to force cleaning equipment (dishwashers and clothes washers) to work with extremely low amounts of water.  This is supposedly environmentally friendly but what it does is ensure that these devices will work poorly.  And I assume that companies that do not adhere to these standards will be fined or their leadership will be liable to arrest by the environmental police of one stripe or another.  The solution to this is to have the red states provide safe havens for manufacturers who produce non-conforming equipment.  And thus, this equipment could be manufactured and sold within these states.  And similarly for other companies and products that the federal government is attacking.  A major case will be gasoline powered cars.  California has legislated a ban on new gas-cars after 2030, I think.  If Joe Biden is re-elected something similar will be attempted nationally.  That would be a perfect time for a coalition of red states to champion fossil fuel devices of all kinds and draw a distinction between free states and slave states.  Le the free states enjoy all the benefits of cheap power while the slave states try to cut their lawns with battery powered mowers and travel around in their battery powered clown cars.  That is until they stall out.

So maybe we can all become pilgrims within our Scatter-Shot States of America and attempt to wring a free and prosperous life despite the worst efforts of the Puritans to make us as miserable as themselves.  It may be our last best hope at happiness.