I'm tired of being in an undeclared civil war. I'm tired of being outraged and insulted in every political discussion. Since about the time of that totally outrageous impeachment I have lost all sense that this deepening chasm in our political land is ever going to get better or go away. I've lost interest in conversation; I don't trust the other side at all, and I can see that they don't think much of me, either. I really don't see why we can't have a national health care system, and a non-violent society where guns are not handed out like popcorn, and I am tired of being called un-American for thinking these are a good idea. I think women really have to be allowed to make their own difficult choices for themselves. (Abortions have been around for all of human history; making them illegal just makes them life-threatening.) I don't see a solution that will re-unite us as a civil nation. I think we're just too polarized to get together again. I don't think that the red states and the blue states are one country anymore.

I want to live someplace with a reasonable limit on political advertising, where people who earn a lot put extra into the pot to help out those who don't, where corporations don't control the legislature, and where the tax laws don't give them easy outs like moving phony HQ to the Bahamas. I'd like to be part of a society where greed is NOT considered good, where civility and a sense of community develop naturally. Where having a heart is not considered a weakness, and where people who yell at and heap abuse on each other are not given TV shows, and where education is truly universal, and educators are valued and even paid. Where the minimum wage isn't given more attention than the possibility of a maximum wage.

So here's what I propose. I'd like to just revisit the last year of the civil war, and tell the (right-wing, now republican) south, "OK, you go your way, and let us go ours. No slavery anywhere. We'll let you keep Texas if you'll just give us back Idaho and California, which is pretty much ours anyway -- the recent governor's race notwithstanding." Then a whole bunch of us will have to pack up and move -- but that will settle itself out. My own state of Colorado will have quite a fight, because Aspen, Boulder and Denver are fairly liberal but the rest of the state are radically right. But I'll move if I have to. And boy, wouldn't it be a great project to re-invent ourselves as a nation! We could take that brilliant, extraordinary constitution and bring it into the 21st century.

"A modest proposal." No crazier than letting the starving poor in Ireland eat their own children ---- right?