If you live in California, you may have seen a few news bits about 'Calexit' the proposal that the state of California 'secede' from the United States and form it's own country. A few celebrities and one or two tech company owners tweeted messages and then went silent as the main steam press pish-poshed the idea. However the proposal is now morphing into a political movement that is already divided into two factions; one to gain signatures for a 2019 referendum on leaving the union and the other on building a political party modeled on the Scottish National Party, that would eventually run candidates for state wide office.
Before I go into detail let me mention that I was born in San Diego and was living in San Francisco in the 1980s, where I had the honor of participating in the Cacophony Society's antics (Zone Trip #2 LA), and the Baker Beach Burns before I moved to Asia (where I live in exile in Shanghai,assisting the Chinese burners here), just missing the Zone Trip #4 1st Burn on the playa I worked for various environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters. It was during a campaign against the Peripheral Canal (a project that would divert Sacramento River delta water south to big agriculture) that while campaigning door-to-door that encountered both split the state and nascent California independence opinions from people at their doorstep. I also met Peter Berg of the Planet Drum organization and learned about his ideas of 'bio-regionalism,' where the outline of your home's watershed becomes the outline for political action. I also read Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, a science fiction story of an independent West Coast and briefly met the man himself at a Berkeley party.
If you can rub your eyes and take a good look through the fog and mist of time you can see the outlines of California as a nation-in-waitng. We share a language with the rest of America, but in our history, culture, values, and way of life we are unique. The recent election results of Nov. 8 made this crystal clear. Historically California was independent for a few weeks in 1846 before the U.S. invaded and annexed it from Mexico. We avoided slavery, the Civil War, and racist baggage that still exists 'over there.' When Mexican and Spanish-speaking immigrants came in bigger numbers after WWII we accepted them and permitted them to assimilate as they saw fit. The Beats and the Hippies came and we helped get the rest of the nation high. Burning Man, while it takes place in Nevada, is a California cultural creation through and through, a phenomenon that really could only have hatched here in San Francisco.
To give up membership in the United States, peacefully, is a massive leap, one not everyone will necessarily want to make. But in articulating a new nationalism (the good, democratic, all-inclusive, tolerant nationalism) we can create a California Nation inside the U.S.A., fight for our rights and laws in the face of the Trump menace. Many of us who are politically engaged and motivated to resist the new order after Jan 21, 2017 are looking for ways to do so and independent California movement could be one more beautiful way to do that. I used to be proud of some parts of being American, but when I think of California I am prouder still. I close my eyes and see our beaches, mountains, deserts, redwoods, fields of rice, wheat, grapevines, and leafy bud, the Golden Gate, Chinatown, the barrios, glitz, glitter,neon and rainbows... the Ten Principles practiced by an entire people, perhaps. Why not? Let this movement begin and grow now, as yet another alternative for us to consider and possibly choose as we face a challenging future on the planet.
Websites Yes California initiative http://www.yescalifornia.org/
California National Party http://www.californianational.party
California State online voter registration https://covr.sos.ca.gov/
Planet Drum Foundation http://www.planetdrum.org/
State of California's Legislative Analysis office study of feasibility of independence
http://www.lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/In ... e/2016-011
[Notes: Yes California appears the better organized group with a flashy website, advertising an ambitious goal to get over 500,000 signatures to put exiting the union on the statewide ballot in 2019. It has one serious issue in that its leader, one Louis Marinelli is from upstate New York, worked to oppose Gay Marriage in 2011, and now lives in, you guessed it, Russia, where,in Moscow he recently opened a 'California Embassy. funded by a semi-government body' They tweet on #CalExit.
The California National Party, which I am an activist in, is the authentic, California based political party that has the more modest goal of registering 50,000 California voters as member in order to get legal status. They will then run candidates for office. Now they are active in joining in anti-Trump events, such as the Women's Marches this coming weekend Jan 20-21, and they have scheduled a first Party Convention on March 11 in Santa Monica. Their goal is to be a California Center-Progressive-Left party that will stand up for California interests and break the GOP-Republican two party stranglehold on politics. We tweet on the hashtag #FreeTheBear]
I'll be happy to continue this conversation with anyone on any platform.
