Why is everybody so upset at the idea that 31,000 (and counting) people want Georgia to secede from the union? Wouldn’t Georgia be better off out of here? Don’t Georgians have the right to opt out from the federal government when they disagree with it? This is not a new idea, you know. It got cranked up most recently around 2009, after Barack Obama first became president, and it has kicked in again with his re-election. There wasn’t much secessionist talk during President Bush’s eight years—oh, maybe some here in Athens, but not much statewide.

There are always the smug “historians” who rush to point out that Georgia actually did secede in 1861 and was immediately attacked by the central government, invaded and brought by force of Yankee arms back into the “union.” Well, it’s no wonder we’re not happy here, especially since the Yankees have elected not even one of our former slaves, but a Kenyan of the Muslim persuasion without even a valid birth certificate.

And do those “historians” know that our nation actually got its start as a Confederation? That’s right. After the Revolutionary War against, you know, a foreign tyrant, our people knew better than to get up under another one, so we formed a kind of loose alliance that reserved all power to the states. Now, that was the kind of government we need today. Nobody in Washington or anywhere else could tell the State of Georgia to do anything. We had our own money; we built our own roads; we had our own tariffs. You actually had to pay to come into Georgia, just like we had to pay to go to South Carolina. State’s rights. You bet. No Emancipation Proclamation nonsense back then. We did it our way. That Confederation would have worked out just fine, except that the Yankees just couldn’t stand to see somebody not doing things their way. That was the biggest mistake we ever made, letting them hornswoggle us out of our perfectly good Confederation. No. They had to have a strong central government that could tell states what to do, and look where it led. Straight to war among the states.

Well, that’s what we’re trying to avoid right now. The power to tax is the power to destroy, and that’s what they’re trying to do to us all over. They are confiscating our money and taking it to Washington. Of course, they give us back a lot more than they take, but it’s the principle of the thing. We don’t want anybody taxing us, and we’d better get out now before the Yankee taxes get so oppressive that corporations like Georgia Power and Coca Cola and Delta Airlines will be operating out of the Cayman Islands. Georgia people do not want to be taxed—not for roads, not for education, not for health care. If the Yankees can get that through their thick skulls, they may start to understand why secession is the intelligent choice for us and not some numbskull, crackpot joke, like they enjoy portraying it.

That’s the whole trouble with what they call the “union.” There’s no allowance for local and regional differences, the kind that give flavor to a place and make Georgia different from, say, Massachusetts. The people up there may want to pay a lot of taxes to build all those confusing freeways, but we don’t want that. Our legislature, in its wisdom, let us choose whether we wanted to tax ourselves in order to build roads, and most of us just said no. And that’s our right. But that doesn’t make us stupid. We turned back around and voted in favor of using our tax dollars to support private schools that are not under the thumb of any government. If that weakens our public school system, that’s just too bad. It strengthens private schools, and that’s the way we like it down here. You watch: one of these days soon, all our schools will be private.

So, you can begin to get the drift about why secession just may be the proper path for an independent people like us. Paul Broun can be our leader, and we’ll be free from Obama’s mind control. And to tell you the truth, you may be glad to see us gone. We may soon have as much clout in Congress and in the Electoral College as Ohio by the time we have conferred citizenship on all our fertilized eggs.