With my progressive social media friends posting articles about the need to take away the right to vote from racist MAGA Hat wearers and my conservative friends posting memes about "Libtards" and the inevitability of a civil war, for the first time in my life I'm wondering if our country can stay together, or if it's not time for what Gwyneth Paltrow famously called the dissolution of her marriage to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin: Conscious Uncoupling.
While Americans were once separated primarily by race, ethnic origin or even class, today we're mostly separated by beliefs and those like-minded people tend to cluster in certain geographic regions. So, why not accept those differences and redefine our North American borders a bit to reflect that? The results could give us all a lot of peace, both on and off of social media.
Here's what it could look like:
Those who rally around the American flag, wear patriotic garb and dress like the founding fathers on the 4th of July tend to be Red Staters-so let's let them keep the USA brand and give them three massive Canadian provinces that also generally share the same values: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. This nation would be the United States of America (USA).
Then, let's ask our friends to the north to slightly adjust their branding by calling themselves the United States of Canada (USC) and give them a dozen or so of our like-minded states like Washington, Oregon, California, New York, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts and Hawaii.
To be sure, USC will get most of the cool cultural centers like Seattle, L.A., Manhattan and Silicon Valley, but I'm not sure Red-Staters will miss them since they were never very fond of them anyway. And while those are significant revenue bases to lose, they'll be made up for by all of the shale in those Canadian provinces and the drilling that will commence immediately when the newly configured USA legalizes oil drilling in Alaska.
The best news of all and what will immediately bring peace to our lives is the end of the culture war as we've known it since the 1960's for the USA will be free to pursue conservative social and economic policies that the Right has dreamed about since the days of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and the USC will be able to implement the dreams of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders with no opposition from the Right. A blue USC and a red USA will also provide us a living laboratory of sorts to compare which ideology works best in practice.
The USA will quickly make most abortions illegal, the right to carry firearms absolute and marriage only available to a man and a woman, once again. Taxes will be drastically lowered and social services scaled back.
In the USC on the other hand, firearms will only be carried by police officers, government will stay out of all reproductive issues and all forms of marriage between consenting adults will be legalized. Tax policy will follow the vision laid out by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders and the Green New Deal will become official national policy.
For those states who have second thoughts, an open door policy will allow any state to secede and join the USA or USC by a 2/3 majority vote of its legislature.
Citizens of both nations will be allowed to travel freely which means citizens of the USA will be able to travel to the USC to procure an abortion or take their favorite drug or engage in whatever activity they can't back home.
For people like me, living in a blue state, other than a new passport with the USC inscription, my life likely won't change much and unlike a marital breakup, in the case of a national divorce there are no children and thus no casualties, just a clean break by simply readjusting our national borders just a bit to ensure that our lives return to some sense of tranquility as we peacefully conclude the culture war without a shot fired.
Then we can all go back to sharing videos of puppies, recipes and pictures of kids and grandkids on our social media channels.
For a nation founded upon the phrase "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to separate from another" this is old hat and may just be the best solution to avoid what we all want to avoid: a real civil war with guns and bullets and blood and death.
If it worked for Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow maybe it will work for the rest of us.
Stranger revolutions have happened.
Mark Joseph is a producer, author and commentator.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
