Nicholas Boke is a freelance writer and international educational consultant.
CHESTER-Things are going so well, aren't they?
A week or so ago, a number of news outlets ran something to the effect that Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas had reported that, thanks to a successful multi-state federal lawsuit, the state doesn't have to provide voter registration data to the Trump administration.
But this wasn't all. A day later, the Campaign Legal Center put this recent response into a broader context, reporting that United States v. Copeland Hanzas is one of more than 30 lawsuits the Justice Department has filed nationwide seeking copies of voter rolls, including driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers in 30 states and the District of Columbia. The DOJ has now lost 24 of those cases in federal district courts and has not won any.
What good news, isn't it?
But there's a limit, isn't there?
I mean, how often should state officials have to sue the federal government to get the federal government to behave in keeping with the U.S. Constitution?
I, for one, have had it.
I'm ready to take the Canada route.
* * *
I don't mean that I'm ready to jump through all those hoops and fill out all those documents that might - or might not - make me a Canadian citizen.
The Canada route now means dealing with Donald Trump and his minions the way Canada is behaving, via its prime minister, Mark Carney: like reasonable human beings would - getting as far away from that whole administration as quickly as possible.
You know, giving up on negotiating with Trump and, instead, creating an entirely new kind of agreement with other - much more reasonable - people, an agreement that would make Canada what is being called an associate member of the European Union.
Everybody thinks it's a good idea - except, of course, Donald Trump, who referred to it as "a hostile act."
Hmm. Isn't that pots and kettles?
Canada clearly decided enough is enough. Haven't most Americans made that same decision, or at least most Americans who understand that Trump and his ilk don't care a bit about anybody but themselves and about anything but their own pocketbooks?
Taking the Canada route wouldn't be that unfamiliar, would it? It was only a couple of decades ago that a lot of Vermonters decided to break with President George W. Bush and secede from the U.S. in 2003.
Well, things are a lot worse than they were under Bush, aren't they? And doesn't it seem likely that the Trump camp is intending to make things even worse in the near (and far) future?
* * *
So let's take the Canada route. Let's figure out a way to turn ourselves not into the Republic of Vermont (as it was from 1777 to 1791), but into something similar to Canada's already-existing 10 provinces and three territories.
Let's fully open our gates to a country that seems to understand what it means to be a friend, an ally, a country that anybody with a brain is glad to have on the planet, especially during these political, social, economic and, especially, climatic disasters.
I'm not the only one to think like this. I'm just the only one to have done so recently, after Carney decided to give up on Trump and his administration. Almost a decade ago, Kevin J. Kelley wrote a long essay for Seven Days, "If at First You Don't Secede: Trump Could Revitalize Vermont Movement."
Kelley's essay concluded with a comment by Vermont environmentalist Bill McKibben about whether he thought the 2003 Vermont independence movement might show up again, saying, "I guess it depends to some degree on what happens with Trump - on whether he turns out to be normally bad or abnormally bad."
Sure looks to me like Donald Trump has dropped well beyond the "abnormally bad" category.
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