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Secession: Not just for old men from Vermont

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Byrne it Down

Between Hillary’s bogus bullet dodging, Barack’s lambasting of “bitter,” small-town America, and the overall creepy vibe I get from John McCain, I’ve begun to wonder if I had better give up and vote for Ron Paul.

Or secede.

Snicker up your sleeves, naysayers, but the secessionist movement is growing. The grizzled old men are gathering around camp fires and in wood sheds across the nation. And in the wood sheds and around the camp fires, the grizzled old men will sport their flannels and stroke their whiskers and plot a brighter future for this festering nation.

The First North American Secessionist Convention was organized by Kirkpatrick Sale ’58, a former Sun editor in chief and associate editor and director of the Middlebury Institute, who, incidentally, also attended a “House Professor’s Tea” at Alice Cook on Friday.

Sale’s first convention was held in Burlington, Vermont, in October of 2006 and attracted your friendly neighborhood fringe-groups, like the neo-Confederates and New England separatists, as well as the more exotic proponents of “New Acadia” (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, with some bits of Canada tossed into the mix) and “Cascadia” (Washington, Oregon, and some more bits of Canada). How the Canadians feel about all this no one knows for sure.

Sale claimed in an interview with The New York Times that the federal government is “a tyrant, aggressive abroad and despotic at home,” and that issues like global warming, rising oil prices, and Iraq, will be the death of it anyway. I would add Hannah Montana, Rock of Love 2 with Brett Michaels, and Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize to that list of doomsday harbingers.

Sale may or may not be a little cracked, but he has a point. The federal, state, and even municipal governments often steamroll the liberties of the very people that allow them their miserable, red-tape snarled existence. Consider the following:

A man was arrested in Times Square in June 2004 for “disorderly conduct.” The provocation? The complaint filed against Matthew Jones stated that the Brooklyn man was standing around with his friends “not moving, and that as a result of defendant’s behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around the defendants.” Well, damn.

When Jones refused a police officer’s request to move, he was handcuffed and spent the night in jail. After a judge refused to dismiss the charges, Jones pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor but immediately filed an appeal. The appellate court upheld his conviction.

Three years, five months, and a whole lot of tax dollars later, the New York State Court of Appeals finally overturned Jones’s conviction. Lesson: Don’t gawk, lollygag, or pause to chew your soft pretzel in any major metropolitan area.

Granted, that’s an isolated — albeit idiotic — incident, and you can’t blame the arresting officer. The city’s changed since the glory days of the ‘70s. Prostitution is down, fewer homeless people, less drug trafficking. The Times Square beat gets old fast. I’d be arresting anything that didn’t move too. Maybe throw in some Tasing on the weekends.

But one government abuse that has surfaced consistently in the past few years is that of eminent domain. The Fifth Amendment states that: “ private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Well and good if the seizure is for necessary public works like highways and sewer systems. But lately, state and local governments have been teaming up with businesses to take property for profit.

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that seizing homes and turning them over to private developers constituted “public use” because of the increased tax revenue such development would earn for the community. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent that, “Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded.”

So technically, the government could condemn my parents’ split-level neighborhood on Long Island and serve it up to a private developer to bulldoze and build into McMansions for the country-club set because the taxes they pay would invigorate the local economy. For the public good — but a particular public’s good.

Back in 2002, New York State condemned a 16-story office building that housed a business school, dormitory, and a couple of small companies, and gave tens of millions of dollars in subsidies for a New York Times building after the paper threw a hissy fit and threatened to move its offices to New Jersey (!). The Times office building on 8th Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets was completed in 2007.

The New York legislature best start putting limitations on the state’s power of eminent domain, because the secessionists will gain strength as more men become old and grizzled. But since the government’s bound to fall anyway, you might as well just ditch the elections and get in on the ground floor — you could be King of Cornellia.

Carolyn Byrne is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at cbyrne@cornellsun.com. Byrne It Down appears alternate Tuesdays.

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