By Stephen Smoot
My wife and both sides of her family hail from New York City. Her father’s family was at one time centered in the Bronx and her mother’s in “bad old days” Brooklyn. That’s where my wife spent her early childhood before they moved eventually to the much safer and a million times more family-friendly Mineral County.
She is as pro gun and pro Second Amendment as any native West Virginian, but my wife also tells the tale of how even when they left the gang imposed violence of 1980s New York City behind, that she and her brother stayed in the habit of lying on the floor at home.
In the neighborhoods where they grew up, you see, stray bullets could come through a window, so best to avoid even a chance of being hit by them. It struck me then that a fundamental and almost visceral truth underlies the entire gun debate.
In a city if one hears a gunshot, the noise always brings up fear and trepidation.
In the country if one hears a gunshot, one automatically assumes that a person is enjoying themselves.
Both sides have a valid point in how they view guns based on their experience. Neither the country nor the city should be able to impose their viewpoint on the other in such issues. Both should have the right to do what they see fit without affecting the other and expecting them to “deal with it.”
Now expand those thoughts outward to a more general plane.
In the city, the biggest threat to life, property, well-being, and order is other human beings. Cities have a preset mindset toward stronger regulations and stricter laws to limit what people can do.
In the country, the biggest threat to life, property, well-being, and order is Nature. Powerful storms can carry away one’s home and life. Excessive heat and drought (which come in cycles as old as time) can kill a farmer-business owner’s livelihood in the fields.
Those who live in the country have a preset mindset toward maximum personal freedom, partly because one needs latitude to adjust to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that Nature can fire, partly because other human beings pose a much more negligible threat to each other.
Country people generally do not care about what happens in a city and have almost no desire to tell them how to live.
City people care very much about what happens in the country and feel obligated to wield power to force the countryside to their priorities, policies, and plans. Only a city person would think that the federal government should step in and fine a farming operation for having too much dirt, which Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency tried against the farm of Lois Alt.
There lies the rub.
The national divide between city and country has widened almost to what was seen between North and South in the 1850s. Mistrust, hatred, and contempt have dominated relations between city and country in the United States through much of this century.
There is likely no going back to the much more civilized and amiable relations between the regions that existed in the 1990s and the political temperatures keep rising.
Here comes a solution that seems so radical on the surface that both sides would instinctively reject it. That said, some solution needs to happen in which both sides can live their lives without fear that the government will crush their aspirations, whatever those might be.
And the conversations need to start somewhere because the status quo is unsustainable.
The British Empire in the early 1900s recognized that some of their colonies, such as Canada and Australia, had created different styles of political environments than the Mother Country. Britain established a condition called “Dominion status.” Under this status, each government controlled domestic law and policy while Britain handled foreign affairs and defense. They had actually proposed this for their American colonies in 1777, a year too late to save their rule here.
Each American city with a population over a certain threshold, perhaps somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million, should have the opportunity to make the irrevocable decision to enter a special status. They could govern without reference to federal or state law, including the Constitutions of both, but they also permanently would give up the right to participate in state or federal elections.
They would only pay a tax equal to their share of defense and foreign affairs, but otherwise not be assessed taxes from the state or federal government. They also would have no expectation of financial support from either the state or federal government, including for infrastructure, should they run themselves into the ground.
They could elect to use US currency and/or create one of their own.
Does this seem radical? Absolutely. Is it possible? Not without a Constitutional amendment.
Such a move, however, would remove almost all of the politically divisive issues that threaten the stability of the Republic. These boil down to the fact that both the Constitution and the traditional American ideals that have succeeded for centuries best fit a Republic of semi-sovereign states and smaller cities.
If major cities choose this path and want to outlaw guns in their jurisdictions, for instance, they can go right ahead. Their banning of firearms would not affect the rights of people outside of their jurisdictions and leaves no need for continued debate. They could embrace as pure a democratic form of election and government as they wish (they do always forget that in the two most pure majority-rule democratic states in history, the older one executed one of the world’s greatest philosophers and the other elected Adolf Hitler.) Similarly, they could pass whatever laws satisfy their own constituents’ particular beliefs.
Also, within states such as New York, Maryland, and Illinois the countryside has become a virtual colony of the cities, providing raw materials and vacation destinations, but having zero say in how their communities are run due to urban domination of the making of state laws.
The Founding Fathers could not have envisioned the countryside of states and state government itself becoming mere appanages of their largest cities. They also could not have foreseen that the cultures of cities and the countryside would diverge so much as to preclude any real understanding of each other, creating wedges separating the body politic.
Places like Upper New York State, Northern California, and Maryland’s eastern and western ends would benefit greatly from removing the major cities from their state’s political equation.
The United States is fracturing culturally, socially, and politically with each national election more and more often a battle for supremacy more than a selection of leadership. Either one side will win and impose its will on the other permanently (basically a dictatorship either way) or some other solution must be embraced to remove the stressors and recognize how to let each side live in peace without interference from the other.
Once the fear of each other’s power and priorities fades, perhaps the two sides can once again find ways to respect and admire each other and stop the continual vicious and costly political battles.
