A short treatise on why I believe its time to secede from the failed nation of America

By REE CAMPBELL

America is broken.

Not broken down, needing repair. Broken, we need to call a scrapper to tow this and figure out where the exit is and what services we will need once there.

Consider:

ONLY the internet is still working properly, and only for those who can afford it.

The rich are holed up in second homes to wait out the danger.

The middle classes are stuck in their homes trying to educate their own children.

The working class have been forced out to the front lines or become homeless. The poverty stricken can’t even get money panhandling right now. Store shelves are empty.

Plants and factories are unable to nimbly shift production needs because they are modernized to create one piece of a larger monopoly on that product. Meat packing plants are closing down. Food is rotting in fields while people wait in miles-long lines for food boxes.

And the government supposed to be helping those people are instead crafting laws to protect those corporations from lawsuits from sick workers forced back to work.

The same government stealing purchased PPE to hoard in stockpiles they say is not meant for the states who bought those stockpiles.

The same government ginning up support from their bases by politicizing both public health and freedoms without responsibilities. 

The same government using the Justice Department to gerrymandering maps and steal votes.

Unemployment rates so high that they have not been seen since the Great Depression but the stock market is soaring. The rich aren’t feeling any of this in any meaningful way.

Everybody thinks America is on the side of the road with a flat tire.

If you crawl under it and swish the smoke away… you will see that the axles have fallen off a completely corroded and rotten chassis.

America has spent the last 40 years on its social vehicle; shining up the body, on paint jobs, graphics, spoilers and turn signals on a car that hasn’t has a tune up or oil change in 40 years.

In real terms, it has sent manufacturing and skilled labor contracts overseas to increase profit; gutted workers rights, wages, and benefits to increase their profits; used taxpayer bailout funds and tax abatements to reward their corporate shareholders; spends an outrageous amount of public funds to pay private companies to imprison the highest population in any developed “democratic” nation in the world; uses publicly funded services to oppress, kill, intimidate, obfuscate, and terrorize its citizens and then uses that same public’s Justice Department to excuse the violence and to blame the victims; systematically defunded schools, infrastructure, social service programs, and the safety net to fund an out-sized and unsustainable military; plundered the treasury for pointless and unwinnable wars so they could profit from those wars; and bowed to the wishes of corporate political interests by handing you the *corporation’s* choice for nomination because he is their creature.

There is no going back to before. This is officially a failed state.

Why are we talking about an election rather than a revolution?

WHAT PART OF ANY OF THIS WILL CHANGE AFTER THE ELECTIONS?

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Ree Campbell is an emergency mental health crisis and disaster relief worker who has been actively involved with advocating for and serving Portland’s houseless community. She currently lives in Olympia, Washington.