The greatest tragedy of the Civil War was that we won. As a consequence, we in the North have been burdened ever since with that racist, bigoted, benighted and backward region of the former Confederacy. As the recent disgraceful events in Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrated, it is a region that still exalts the defenders of slavery and condones the outrages of the neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
By gerrymandering congressional districts, suppressing the voting rights of its African-American citizens, and exerting its disproportionate representation in the Senate, it has been able for decades to exert a reactionary drag on our political life. Though receiving far more in federal government spending than it contributes in federal taxes, it consistently opposes national efforts to provide basic rights to education, health, environmental protection and income security to its own and our citizens.
It is understandable that in the aftermath of a costly victory in a painful and prolonged war, our predecessors celebrated the preservation of the union. Now, however, enough time has surely passed to permit a more judicious view of that unfortunate outcome.
I submit that now we should be prepared to offer the states of the former Confederacy a peaceful and generous separation, a “Dixit” if you will, along with sincere apologies for our former intransigence and a warm welcome for refugees fleeing north.
There are those who will revive the argument that dissolution of the union will invite the intrusion of foreign powers into North America, but with the evidence of two centuries before them, which of those powers would wish to assume the burdens that the North has borne for so long? China perhaps, with its long tradition of excellence in textile manufacturing and rice farming, but who is to say that a cultural revolution in Alabama is not long overdue?
In any case, should China or any other power be reckless enough to intrude, they will be bogged down and weakened, while we in the North will be freed to progress.
Robert Repetto
Amherst