Things Fall Apart, Ready or Not
Feb 8, 2013 20:11:32 GMT -5
Post by Michael Downing on Feb 8, 2013 20:11:32 GMT -5
After reading "Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century" I began to search out other writings of the contributors. Kirkpatrick Sales is one of those contributors. This is from an article written back in the beginning of 2006...
middleburyinstitute.org/thingsfallapart.html
Whether or not secession in the U.S. is practical, as a number of perfectly serious hard-headed people are saying, may not actually even be an important question—it may simply become necessary. For one thing, as hurricane Katrina has glaringly shown, the Federal government is a clumsy, bureaucratic, politicized, and insensitive instrument (and as the rebuilding will show, corrupt as well), and states and localities that give themselves over to depending on it are in real trouble. If communities or states want to survive an emergency of any kind, they are going to have to develop agencies and institutions of their own, grounded in local realities, resources, and capabilities. This is exactly what a secessionist state would be best able to develop, at an efficient and democratic scale.
For another, an increasing crowd of people is predicting that an economic crunch is coming, made up of dwindling oil supplies, sky-high gasoline prices, severe weather crises, global warming dislocations, collapse of the dollar, and unsupportable national debt, and will be upon us faster than we think. And if that happens, none of the global and national systems and corporations that now dominate the economy will be able to survive. The global economy will collapse, and take the American empire down with it, and the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like prosperity.
It is then that smaller political and social units will be essential for survival and will arise where people have the sense and strength to establish self-sufficient and self-directing polities, whether they be states (or confederations of states), bioregions, cities, or communities. It is then that state secession will make sense in a multitude of ways, not only desirable as a means of extraction from the crumbling national economy but necessary as a means of concentrating on the development of local resources for local needs. And it becomes possible because the national apparatus will be essentially powerless to prevent it.
Of course it would be easiest to shrug off the impending doom as the predictions of madmen and malcontents, and go about business as usual, fueling the $700 trillion national debt and the $200 billion trade deficit and assuming oil production will never peak. But it would be terribly foolish. The only sensible thing to do is to start thinking now about ways to survive and even thrive at a smaller scale. James Howard Kunstler, who has analyzed the coming crunch in his new book, The Long Emergency, has said that the new economy will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local.
It would only prudent to start figuring out now just how to make that economy work, what resources we have in our immediate area and how they can best be utilized, what kinds of governance we would need and at what levels.
Things fall apart, and now secession begins to make a lot of sense.
middleburyinstitute.org/thingsfallapart.html
Whether or not secession in the U.S. is practical, as a number of perfectly serious hard-headed people are saying, may not actually even be an important question—it may simply become necessary. For one thing, as hurricane Katrina has glaringly shown, the Federal government is a clumsy, bureaucratic, politicized, and insensitive instrument (and as the rebuilding will show, corrupt as well), and states and localities that give themselves over to depending on it are in real trouble. If communities or states want to survive an emergency of any kind, they are going to have to develop agencies and institutions of their own, grounded in local realities, resources, and capabilities. This is exactly what a secessionist state would be best able to develop, at an efficient and democratic scale.
For another, an increasing crowd of people is predicting that an economic crunch is coming, made up of dwindling oil supplies, sky-high gasoline prices, severe weather crises, global warming dislocations, collapse of the dollar, and unsupportable national debt, and will be upon us faster than we think. And if that happens, none of the global and national systems and corporations that now dominate the economy will be able to survive. The global economy will collapse, and take the American empire down with it, and the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like prosperity.
It is then that smaller political and social units will be essential for survival and will arise where people have the sense and strength to establish self-sufficient and self-directing polities, whether they be states (or confederations of states), bioregions, cities, or communities. It is then that state secession will make sense in a multitude of ways, not only desirable as a means of extraction from the crumbling national economy but necessary as a means of concentrating on the development of local resources for local needs. And it becomes possible because the national apparatus will be essentially powerless to prevent it.
Of course it would be easiest to shrug off the impending doom as the predictions of madmen and malcontents, and go about business as usual, fueling the $700 trillion national debt and the $200 billion trade deficit and assuming oil production will never peak. But it would be terribly foolish. The only sensible thing to do is to start thinking now about ways to survive and even thrive at a smaller scale. James Howard Kunstler, who has analyzed the coming crunch in his new book, The Long Emergency, has said that the new economy will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local.
It would only prudent to start figuring out now just how to make that economy work, what resources we have in our immediate area and how they can best be utilized, what kinds of governance we would need and at what levels.
Things fall apart, and now secession begins to make a lot of sense.