:dubious: And “total war to crush the rebellion” somehow wouldn’t severely weaken American power? Total wars on home soil are crippling. It takes decades for a country to recover from such a trauma.
Anyways, I’d probably stay put. I’d rather retain my US citizenship, but I don’t think it’s valuable enough, considering the alternative, to make me want to uproot my entire life. As much as I like to bitch about the government of Ohio, especially since last November, I don’t think it’s so totally corrupt and incompetent that it would make the sky collapse so much so that I’d wish I’d moved.
SoCal, staying. At least, based on the info given (not much). Might be different if there was some bad stuff causing the split - like, say, California wanting to try out Prohibition one more time. Which is to say, pretty unlikely.
As it will likely be, there will be problems with all those refugees coming in. If they come to SoCal, they’ll each want to have some water, which will be a problem, and if they come to Northern Cal, well, that will be different problems. But hey, it’s cool, we’ll work something out.
As for me, well, it’s home.
I’d almost certainly stay here in Vermont. It’d be a socialist paradise!
We’ll bring ol’ Howard Dean back and he’ll finally get to be president. Then we’ll have Bernie Sanders as Grand Chancellor, and Patrick Leahy can be The Viceroy.
As much I’d hate to leave, I simply have no faith that California could stay afloat for more than a few weeks on it’s own.
But, Arnold could be president!
Why so little trust in California?
The state is already broke so I cannot imagine what would happen if we didn’t have the rest of the US to hold us up.
I said I’d relocate, because I wouldn’t want to give up my US citizenship. But I find that condition to be unlikely. Anyway, I’d only have to move about 1/2 a mile and I’d be back in the US. It would barely register as a change.
I live in California, and we’d be better off without the rest of the country. Oregon and Washington can come along, but everyone east of the Colorado river can suck it.
As long as the Colorado river, itself, comes with us…
I live in California and I’d probably stay. Like others have said, it’s big and diverse enough to be a respectable country all on its own.
CA pays more to the Feds than services it receives, so economically we’d likely end up better off. Furthermore, we’d have the advantage that just about every other western country has–we could underspend on the military, confident we’d be protected under the umbrella of the US military. Doubly so, given that we’d be a bordering country.
As mentioned upthread, it depends on the politics behind the change. If it’s to establish a haven for people who believe very differently from me (say the Baptists want their own personal Utah) then I’m outta here. But if it’s just economics and a desire for more sovereignty then I’ll stay right here in Colorado. Folks here definitely have opinions about stuff like guns, weed, immigration reform and religion, but not a lot of fanatacism pro or con. This has got to be the most “live and let live” place I’ve ever been to and I really dig it.
Other: I just don’t have enough information to make that sort of a decision. Florida could well be self sufficient, but I’d need to know a lot of other things before deciding to revoke my US citizenship.
Goodbye and take Stephen Harper with you. Please.
For all the rest of you this has been a very theoretical exercise. For us in Quebec, it is not. I have thought long and hard what I will do when Quebec decides to separate. The main “if” is not whether they will. Given the ups and downs of life, they will decide one day (came withing 50,000 stolen votes 16 years ago). My main “if” is whether I will still be alive when it happens. Incidentally, one of the motives the separatists have is to keep young people from moving to Alberta and work in the oil sands.
Pro staying: I have lived about 57% of my life here and I like it for the most part. I am familiar with it and my friends are here. If I leave, I will still get my pension, but in shrunken wizened Quebec dollars (aka Renés).
Pro leaving: The first years there will be real economic hardship. Canada has a long-standing program of sending money from the wealthier provinces (mostly Ontario, BC, and, yes, Alberta to the “have-nots” and Quebec gets a couple billion a year that will be sorely missed. I predict that there will be ten years of hardship followed by gradual recovery. We might also expect a fair bit of violence, especially when it sets in how constricted their lives have become and how separation is no panacea for their problems. There is no, for example, a couple of bridges that connect Ottawa and Gatineau. You can easily walk or drive over them. In a separate Quebec, they would acquire customs posts. What a mess!
If I were still living in my native state of Pennsylvania, it would be unthinkable. Imagine Philadelphia being cut off from Camden!
You’ll have to pull my boot out, first.
I wish I could treat this as an absurd hypothetical, but Texas seems to finish a perennial first in the ‘state most likely to secede’ polling.
I’d be so gone. I can barely stand this place as it is, sometimes.
For my own country, haven’t voted in the poll:
If Navarra secedes, my ghost will have to come back to apologize to y’all for the bits of my brain blown all over the world. Sorry.
If Euskadi manages to secede and carry Navarra with it, I’m moving either to the Balearic Islands, preferably one of the smaller villages in Mallorca, or to Andorra. Nice tax structure, Andorra, and I like mountains - and as for Mallorca, it has a nice climate and one of the three Spanish airports with flights to pretty much “anywhere in Europe you care to name, and parts elsewhere”. The other option would be to stay and bite heads off, which I don’t think my teeth are good enough for.
Pennsylvania. If things were so f’d up in the US that Penn’s Woods chose to secede, I believe I would hear the Caribbean calling my name.
ETA: with some of PA’s politicians, there is always the possibility they said they wanted to “succeed” but a spelling error caused confusion.
I live in Texas, which has a certain illusion of being another country already, so I’d most likely stay. I was born in another state though, so could probably claim dual-citizenship and move back to the Non-Texas-States-of-America if things went er, South.
Honestly though… what kind of mess would that be? Would Texas raise its own army? Could be build nukes? Would Rick Perry possibly be the President? (oh wait) and more importantly, what would happen to the Dallas Cowboys? That sort of thing might seriously mess with the QB’s head.
In case you didn’t notice, Qin, Al Gore didn’t carry Tennessee in his presidential bid.
If Washington left unilaterally, I’d move. If the Cascadia Movement was coming to fruition, I’d highly consider staying depending on how the politics worked out.