‘Calexit’ — a notion separated from reality
Louis Marinelli, the 30-year-old English teacher and California secession movement co-founder, has announced his intention to drop efforts to qualify the “Calexit” measure for the 2018 election ballot and move to Russia, “a country I have grown to love.” I sent him a note. I was curious what he had to say to Californians (OK, me) who believe his movement to have us secede from the United States might be the work of the Russian government.
Secession is serious business, and Marinelli didn’t strike me as an uncompromised backer of the movement.
Maybe it was the fact that he’d worked on the campaign from his apartment in Yekaterinburg, the fourth-largest city in Russia. Maybe it was the pro-Russia posts he wrote on the campaign blog. Maybe it was the campaign office space he’d accepted from a Kremlin-backed group. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But if you give me enough dots, I will see a pattern. Marinelli got right back to me. “Anyone who believes our petition was the work of the Russian government is a sheep,” he wrote. “Easily manipulated, and scared by propaganda in the midst of ridiculous anti-Russian hysteria.”
How sad! I thought.
I didn’t feel sad at being called a scared, easily manipulated sheep. (If being called names by strange men on the Internet were enough to get me down, I’d have left this business long ago.)
Instead, I felt sad that Marinelli believed that his background wouldn’t lead sensible people to immediately dismiss his plans for our future.
“From the beginning, I have been a reluctant leader of the Calexit campaign,” Marinelli wrote in his farewell statement. (But not reluctant enough to let someone else lead? I thought.)
I also felt sad that so many Californians (1 in 3, according to a January poll from Reuters) are so fed up with the rest of the country, that they’re willing to support the completely bananas idea of setting up our own country.
After all, if you can’t look at the Marinelli saga and realize that secession rarely works to the advantage of those who believe they want it, then I’m not sure how to get through to you.
Forget history, although the U.S. has more than enough examples to prove this point (while the Southern states exhausted their resources in a pro-slavery secession fight, the Union states consolidated an economic advantage that remains till this day). We can talk about what’s going on today.
The “state of Jefferson” separatists in far Northern California, for example, rave about the regulations and various indignities they must suffer for the benefit of being carried by the tax money and economic innovations of the diverse, prosperous districts below.
These throwbacks believe they’re special enough to do better for themselves, and regularly start insulting petitions that the rest of us tolerate.
The truth is, these are the poorest counties in the state. They’d flounder without us. The rest of California might have to pay a little more for weed after they left, but on the whole we’d be lifted by their exit, and they’d be begging the federal government for help instead.
State secessionist sorts would have us believe California would be different.
California is rich, so rich we subsidize other U.S. states. We were the world’s sixth-largest economy in 2015, according to the state department of finance.
I’ve also heard about the “values” that make California different and better than the rest of the country: “Our views on education, science, immigration, taxation and healthcare are different,” wrote Marcus Ruiz Evans, Marinelli’s co-leader, in a Jan. 21 commentary in the Mercury News.
“Values” is a common theme for today’s aggrieved separatists.
These people range in location, from England to Washington state, but they generally have one thing in common: They’ve never really experienced what it was like to depend on their “values” in the face of aggressive state power. You know who have? The people of Russia. Over the past several years, a small number of brave Russians have kept an anti-Putin movement alive. They’ve done this in the big cities — where Putin does not share their values — and they’ve done it at great physical risk.
Instead of launching a secession movement — the political equivalent of trying to take their toys and go home — they’ve dedicated themselves to freeing their country and all of the people in it. Even the ones who are afraid to be free.
Instead of listening to a movement with ties to Putin, then, perhaps the people of California should look to their counterparts in Putin’s country.
These are the people who understand that it’s only by working together that people become powerful. Separation may stroke our petty urges, but it inevitably leads to isolation, weakness and defeat.
Let’s stay within America, California. Our fellow Americans need us, but we need them, too.
Advocates of secession have never really experienced what it was like to depend on their “values” in the face of aggressive state power.