Not for me personally, as North Carolina’s a red, Republican state outside of Durham, but the upside if some of the blue states finally called it quits (overlooking that in reality it would inevitably lead to violence). And imagining life in all the Trump-loving rural states that want to make women second-class citizens and fantasize that their tax dollars are going to support lazy black people, immigrants and homeless vagrants in the big cities.
What a shock they’d have when they discover it’s the other way around: they’re the welfare queens depending on federal funding — farm support, Social Security, Medicare — to stay afloat. And that areas like California and NYC are the ones who put the money in the federal budget for that stuff. Take those blue areas away and presto, Alabama, Northwest Florida, Nebraska are going to look like Bangladesh.
Trouble is, I don’t think making more of the world look like Bangladesh is a good thing. I don’t think even Bangladesh being Bangladesh is a good thing. The goal should be less suffering, not more.
One of the things I truly despise about the right wing these days is that so many people on the right seem to want others to suffer. Like the petty spitefulness of the Trump administration deciding if gay couples are naturalized citizens, their kids are not US citizens. I know Trump dislikes birthright citizenship (too many icky brown people coming in!) but I can’t see any purpose to this other than shitting on gays out of pure spite.
But the solution is not to make life worse for any anti-gay bigots who think this is awesome. It’s to stop the policy (which will make the bigots feel worse but only as a side effect).
Any policy whose primary rationale is to hurt people is a bad policy.
“A good man will seek to take the pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself. And the poor, unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.” — William Saroyan
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” ― Italo Calvino
