Maine could secede (continued)
	" I’m sure Canada would have you " When I asked him, artist David Snow said he didn’t see much point in seceding. " [English-] Canadians are decaffeinated Americans, " he gibed. But pollster/social scientist Michael Adams, would beg to differ. His book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values won 2004’s Donner Prize for Canadian public-policy literature. Based on 10 years of surveys, Adams found that even though Canadians are inundated with American popular culture, and the two countries trade more than any two nations on earth, their cultural values are, paradoxically, diverging. Adams attributes this divergence to differing constitutional values and social policy structures. While America was founded on the idea of " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, " Canada’s constitution is dedicated to " peace, order, and good government, " a decidedly less individualistic, more community-minded stance, which explains Canada’s predisposition for " balancing individual autonomy with a sense of collective responsibility, " according to Adams. The rampant individualism found in the US comes at the expense of security and stability. " [I]n an instant, illness, crime, or an injudicious investment portfolio can turn the proverbial American Dream into an outright nightmare, " Adams writes in " Who Are the Real Masters of Docility?, " an essay found on theglobalist.com. As a result, " an ever greater proportion of America is clinging to old institutions — family, church, state . . . even gangs — as anchors in an increasingly chaotic world. " Americans are seeking stability in traditional authorities: " a strong police force, a strong military, a strong nation, the President and Commander-in-Chief. " Ironically, then, in this land of the free, people are afraid to explore new perspectives, new ways of living. New Englanders, however, share more in common, philosophically, with Canadians than they do with their compatriots in the deep South. This may be due in part to shared weather patterns and terrain, and mingled branches on the English family tree. So I asked Adams if he thought we’d fit in. He answered, as politely as any Canadian might, " If Maine wants to join, I’m sure Canada would have you. " —JL

Progressives will also be happy to hear that the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians who live together enjoy the same rights and benefits as straight common-law couples. Same-sex marriages are legal in more than half of Canada’s provinces. And after Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that a proposed law allowing gay marriage is constitutional, the government is moving ahead with legislation that would legalize it nationwide.

And Canada was the first country in the world to permit and regulate the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. In 2002, a Senate committee report recommended legalizing marijuana. This recommendation is supported by the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. The federal government " has committed to introducing a bill to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, " according to CanadianAlternative.com.

Vancouver has a supervised drug-injection site, which a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal reports " has resulted in measurable improvements in public order. "

The United Nations has named Toronto the most multicultural city in the world.

And Canadian voters use paper ballots which they mark with an X, making computer voting fraud an impossibility, and eliminating the kinds of problems chads and butterfly ballots have caused in the US.

I miss Canada.

LAST JANUARY, I learned that I was not the only secessionist in New England. Utne magazine ran a story about a sovereignty movement coalescing in Vermont. Spearheaded by Thomas Naylor, a retired Duke University economics professor, the movement has been gathering steam, especially since Bush’s election victory. In fact, when I spoke with him, Naylor told me, " Bush is like the chairman of our membership committee and our cheerleader. Every time he opens his mouth, we recruit more members. "

Like a lot of people, Naylor believes that something has gone terribly wrong with US government. " Our government is too big, too centralized, too powerful, too intrusive, too materialistic, too high-tech, too globalized, too militarized, too imperialistic, too violent, too undemocratic, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities, " according to his book, The Vermont Manifesto (Xlibris). Corporate America, Naylor says, has gained too much power over our politics, corrupting the democratic intent of our founding forefathers. " Washington can serve groups of people; those with enough funding to get its ear. It can no longer serve the individual. The country is just too large. "

Big business, big government, and big agriculture are, according to lawyer and movement supporter John Remington Graham, causing us Americans to lose " our local distinctness and character in a homogenized culture and government which has been imposed on us. " The " bigger is better " consumerist mindset has allowed Wal-Mart, for example, to inundate communities, running smaller, community-based operations out of business. Wal-Mart is now the biggest employer in America and the biggest company in the world, with 50 percent greater sales than Target, Costco, Sears, and Kmart combined, according to Naylor. Individualism is being subsumed, community is becoming obsolete. Corporate America is the puppeteer pulling the strings in Washington, and its first priority is not the common good.

" Bigger is better " translates into an empire mentality that has spawned a foreign policy based on " full spectrum dominance, " and is responsible for the imposition of US military might in, currently, 153 countries, says Naylor. As the world’s only superpower, America’s reputation as bully on the block has alienated much of the world and put the US at risk for terrorist attack. The war in Iraq, instigated over heated public objection and on the basis of false claims of weapons of mass destruction, has cost over 1300 (and counting) American lives and as many as 100,000 civilian Iraqi lives, and, at a cost of almost $4 billion a month, it is partly responsible for our skyrocketing national debt.

The US government uses the " elevated terror alert " that it, itself, has stoked, to curtail civil liberties (in the name of the USA PATRIOT Act), compromising the very constitutional rights upon with this " land of the free " was built, and making Orwellian doublespeak of " Operation Iraqi Freedom. " In the October, 2004, Harper’s, editor Lewis Lapham outlines the findings of the National Lawyers Guild in its report, " The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent, " describing " pre-emptive strikes " (Lapham’s phrase) against activists and delineating, respectively, each assailed Constitutional amendment. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security has advised law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on those expressing " dislike of attitudes and decisions of the US government " (again, Lapham), and FBI agents and police spies have been known to infiltrate protests, taking pictures and collecting names and addresses.

On April 15, 2000 (Clinton’s watch), the night before a World Bank/IMF demonstration, police trapped and arrested more than 600 demonstrators, bystanders, tourists, and journalists, for no lawful reason, confining some of them in police buses for as long as 18 hours while denying them food and water, use of the bathroom for hours on end, and access to a phone to call lawyers. And " free speech zones, " such as the one at the Democratic National Convention, are caged enclosures set apart from any proximity to the event being protested, rendering free speech effectively silent.

American imperialism and big corporations are homogenizing this country and silencing the individual. Secessionists believe it’s time to make America smaller. They point out that five of the world’s 10 richest nations are, in fact, very small (Iceland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands), and that large countries are prone to collapse, victims of their own bureaucratized inertia.

Though it’s hard for Americans to see their place in history, Naylor points out that every great empire eventually falls. In the 1980s, for example, few imagined that the Soviet Union would soon break apart. Naylor, an emeritus economics professor who consulted for Fortune 500 companies and governments in more than 30 countries, including the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, sees similarities, according to the Utne article, between " the centralized bureaucracies and militaristic leaders of the old Soviet empire and the huge corporations and militaristic leaders that now run America. "