Governor Sherrill

Rebecca Michelle "Mikie" Sherrill will be inaugurated as the fifty-seventh governor of the state of New Jersey, and she plans to hit the ground running with an energy emergency declaration to cut utility rates, invest more in solar energy, make housing more affordable, and improve the motor vehicle office.

That is all good and fine, but just because we in New Jersey will have a center-left governor who will pursue more humane policies than what's coming out of Washington doesn't mean we will be safe from Donald Trump.  Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who is more progressive than Sherrill is,  has ICE agents overrunning his state and is being investigated for obstructing federal authority even as Trump threatens to send the Army in.  The end. 

It doesn't take much for something to happen in New Jersey to give Trump an excuse to send federal troops or agents to New Jersey, particularly our cities, most of which have been down on their heels for so long that there are generations of New Jerseyans who don't remember a time when Newark or Camden were places people wanted to go to.   Trump sending troops to our cities, where brown people are a majority, would be a calamity.  U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver, who is black, was arrested for trying to investigate an ICE detention center in Newark that housed Hispanic migrants, as was Mayor Baraka; McIver has since been charged and three felony counts of assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering with a federal officer, and the case is still set to go to trial.  What better way for Trump to divide the mostly black and Hispanic cities against the white suburbs and rural areas (yes, we have some)?

You know where I'm going with this.  As a secessionist, I feel compelled to promote my arguments for secession whenever and with whomever I can.  Therefore, once Governor-elect Sherrill is sworn in, I am writing a letter to her to advocate for New Jersey to secede from the Union and hopefully encourage other Democratic states - like Minnesota - to follow.  (Personally, I hope that Minnesota secedes first, and I have not ruled out writing Governor Walz to say that Minnesota to do so.)  I am making the argument to Sherrill that a soft secession - withholding New Jersey's federal tax revenue, for example - is not enough and that it is time for the United States to split into separate countries.  I am also making the argument to her that if enough states pull out of the Union, it can lead to a negotiated national divorce that effectively dissolves the Union and creates new countries without a shot being fired. 

I still support the dissolution of the Union.  I am still a secessionist.

(P.S.  Here is revised map of my idea for a post-United States North America.  I decided to put West Virginia into the Middle Atlantic republic of Lenapia instead of the Midwestern republic of Heartland, because it would be awkward to have a state of the Midwestern republic on the opposite side of the Ohio River.  I added to Heartland Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and cleaved off the western ends of the latter two state by setting the border between Heartland and the State of Deseret along the Continental Divide through the Rocky Mountains.  Gran Colorado has been eliminated; Arizona and New Mexico became a Republic of New Mexico.  The original New Mexico Territory that was established in 1850 then included the bulk of both the modern states of New Mexico and Arizona.  Click on the map for a better look.)