TC LP Commentary: 1 Published on the Twin
Cities Labor Party website in the late 1990s during Clinton time, re-published here with slight modifications.
In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, who suggested that the rich eat poor children so as to reduce the population in sad old industrial England, I make this suggestion --
perhaps with the tongue not quite so far in the cheek.
A Less Modest Proposal:
If you remember about a year ago, the lodge owners of the
Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota side of the
border were upset that fishing restrictions in Canada
had decreed fisherman catching Canadian fish had to stay in Canada one
night. To protest this, and perhaps to
circumvent this rule, a small group of inhabitants of the northern triangle
poking into Canada decided they wanted to leave the United States and join
Canada.
 |
| The Secret Country Just North - yeah, its up there... |
The press swarmed around to cover this tiny can of worms, so
to speak. Reporters interviewed each
disgruntled lodge owner and threw barbed comments at the Canadians for their
protectionist fish. Let us eat fish, as
it were, no matter their nationality ... I suggest the Twin Cities Labor Party
take a similar tack, though not with quite so short a line or tiny a boat.
Minnesota -- from the
north-flowing Red River to the St. Croix, from the Mississippi
to the Minnesota River, from Lake Superior to the cold Boundary Waters, from
the invisible line across the southern farms of the state to the invisible line
along much of the northern part of the state -- should secede from the United States and join Canada.
My father was a Canadian and my parents were married
there. Like others in Minnesota, the country up there is no
stranger to us here. We spend their
money, pretending it is US
money, and sneakily getting the same value for it. We visit their folk festivals and lakes and
shiver from their crumby weather. Their lumber
flows across our borders and builds our homes.
They even sound like us -- most can’t tell the difference between a Winnipeg accent and a Minneapolis one. Let’s face it, Minnesota is just proto-Canada, lower
Canada.
Let’s make it official.
Indeed, they have a better Social Security system than we do -- it is
not yet in danger of being privatized. Their
health care system, poorly aped by Minnesota Care, is the best in North America
and perhaps all of America. Their public sector is not quite so starved
for funds as ours. Their public TV and
radio has been around far longer than ours and is of higher quality. Their labor movement is not quite so passive and demoralized. We in the TC Labor Party want single-payer
health insurance and this is the way to get it!
We would be blessed with a smaller military budget, with a life
and car insurance system supported by the government and with a ready-made
Labor Party, (yes, with all it’s problems) the New Democratic Party (NDP).
The slaves in the 1860s escaped from the United States to go to Canada, as it
was the real terminus of the Underground Railroad. The draft opponents who moved to Canada in the
60s-70s made it a more civil society. We
should look in the same direction as they did.
Although the progressive impulses of the Civil War and Depression have been
long quiet until the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the new wage slaves should escape and
go north to the “drinking gourd” as it were, and join the Canadian federation
as a new province, the Province
of Minnesota. Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire
should be next, then Washington and Oregon and even California,
and perhaps North Dakota and Michigan.
We could lead a movement to have most of America
secede from the new Confederacy centered in Washington
D.C., Arlington
& McClean,
Virginia; and Texas and the former slave states. Among other things, send the undemocratic
electoral college, the Supreme Court and the Senate packing.
Our State should vote with its feet -- succession is really
a good way to end the tight embrace of corporatism. Let’s let the U.S. government know we’ve about
had it.
December 20, 2016
Red Frog
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