This little knee slapper landed in my inbox, and I just had to share. Bear in mind that I live in a red state and was raised in a red state. Both of which are battlegrounds this year (NC and VA). The author of this piece is unknown according to About.com. It's tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek funny with a good dose of snark baked in. With the snark comes a drizzle of truth.
Dear Red States:
If you manage to steal this election too we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes California , Hawaii , Oregon , Washington , Minnesota , Wisconsin , Michigan , Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss. We get 85% of America 's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama . We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.
Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines, 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico
Peace out,
Blue States
14 comments:
Here via Twitter. Love it!
Also here via twitter. Isn't it cool we are in a state that is a battle state? Makes me want to get out and canvass people, except all my neighbors have Obama signs out.
I saw this in a MySpace bulletin - I ♥ it. I especially loved the quip about happy families. Republicans seem to think that they have the secret to happy marriages when statistically it's the liberal heathens that do! *lol*
Here from Twitter. Thought this was funny til I saw the part about the University of Georgia. This is a pretty liberal town, no matter what you might think.
Anonymous, I agree about the University of Georgia. In fact, I almost went to graduate school there.
OMG that is hilarious!
Love it...L..O..V..E...IT!!!
Oh, I remember getting this right after the '04 election! I'm really hoping we don't have to make good on that threat of secession!
I've got to quibble on two points. Sadly, MN may actually trifle with your tornado figure a bit... and I think Minnesotans are actually breeding mosquitoes as pets.
Still, well said.
Too funny! Proud blue stater.
That last comment was from me. My fingers are apparently from a red state, hitting enter to post before I'd credited it.
Oh Tom, how right you are about the mosquitoes in Minnesota! I lived there for eight years and don't miss them or the cold!
I hope to be a proud Blue Stater soon! Thanks for laughing along with me, folks.
Both the Dear Red and Dear Blue States were published in 2005. Don't miss the response:
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Dear Blue States:
Well, imagine our relief that you’ve decided to secede and form some sort of bathing-optional commune headquartered in California. The money we'll save in aspirin, now that we won’t have headaches from listening to your interminable whining, will be worth it to us alone.
We'll finally be rid of you lazy, moping, latte-sucking Streisand fans now that you're actually going to follow through--for once--on your promise to finally get off your butts and leave, as so many of you claimed you would every election cycle and then chickened out of actually doing. (Yeah, we’re looking at you, Alec Baldwin.)
But not so fast. You don’t get to take all the Blue States with you--just the Blue parts.
We hate to break it to you, but your Blue States aren’t actually "blue." Mostly, they’re states full of Red counties with pockets of Blue urban blight in them, who vote Democratic in such numbers that if the same results came out of a Third World country—which, come to think of it, many of the "Blue" counties pretty much are—we’d think it was fraud and send some election observers from the UN.
Even California is pretty much a Red State: Bush won 35 out of 58 counties, while Kerry won LA and San Francisco. You want 'em? we certainly won’t fight you for them but you're going to have to found New California without 35 of your most beautiful counties and your second-largest city. Sorry about that.
Nationally, Bush won over 2.5 million square miles of U.S. counties (and an extra three and a half million votes, but we won't rub that in.) Kerry won less than 600,000 square miles--meaning that in most states he was popular downtown and pretty much nowhere else. In other words, your guy won the places that people like him would get shot if he walked through them at night. Our guy won every place else.
So, the bottom line is that you don't get the Blue States. Those states have lots of towns and counties that would rather blow their dams and flood themselves out of existence rather than go with you. No, instead, you get the Blue Cities.
But wait…we really feel we owe you full disclosure on this exchange. This might come as an unpleasant surprise, but you don’t actually get the lower divorce and single-motherhood rates and all that other good stuff you think you're going to snag. Those are the conditions that are actually found out in the Red counties—not in the Blue cities, and you can't have them.
Instead you get the urban single moms, not the soccer moms; the drug addicts, not the doctors; the waiters, not the chefs. You get the fine service you've come to expect from the brutal and corrupt inner-city police departments. You get the abysmal literacy rates and schools that are more dangerous than most prisons. All in all, you get to take with you a public sector in most cities so unmanageable they make Mogadishu seem like a tidily run little municipality by comparison.
You get the labor union shakedown artists, "teachers" who can’t pass tests in their own subject, and city government leaders for whom graft, racial spoils systems, and outright theft are a way of life. They’re all very enthusiastic Blue voters, as you know, and we’re sure they’ll stampede their way to New California to start draining your wallets, wrecking your schools, and in general making a mess of your lives.
(And don't come complaining back to us when socialist central planning does for New California what it did for garden spots like East Berlin and Pyongyang. We're putting a strict visa system into place once you all go.)
We, on the other hand, get those Red city suburbs and rural districts. You know, the ones with the good schools, the high property values, the quiet streets and the sheriffs and cops who don’t need to walk around armored up like they’re about to storm the Sunni Triangle.
Oh and don’t concern yourself with our agricultural capacity after all, they don't call it "the breadbasket" for nothin'. We’ll keep right on producing the vast majority of wheat, corn, oats, rye, potatoes, soybeans, beef, chicken and pork.
We’ve always preferred a nice, unpretentious, frosty mug of brew anyway and hey, maybe you can make a salad with those pineapples, stem cells, and lettuce.
And don't even think about keeping the National Parks, the wide open spaces, all those water resources, and all the rest of America's natural splendor, since those are all pretty much located in Red counties.
Hell, we even get most of Oregon and Washington ...ain’t it ironic? You get the urban liberals in Portland and Seattle and their friends in important social organizations (like, say, drug-running street gangs) and we get the rest of the Northwest.
Ok by us; we’d be fools not to take you up on it.
Here’s how it will work; all of you Blue whiners, please feel free to look at a map of the electoral results county by county in each state, and take the people with you who’ve made it clear they’d like to go.
That means you get places like downtown Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and we get to keep the rest of beautiful Pennsylvania, thanks.
You get to administer bloated public services to the violent, drug-addled, gunslinging populations of delightful inner-city sinkholes of poverty and corruption such as Miami, St. Louis,Atlanta and the ever-popular District of Columbia--which has been governed by liberals (and the occasional crackhead) for so long and so incompetently that any semblance of order has broken down (beyond the carefully guarded borders of your Georgetown bistros, natch) to the point where even the mayor once asked the President to have the city patrolled by National Guardsmen.
Lucky you, it's all yours--enjoy it in good health, and don’t forget to wear your Kevlar...Blue "voters" up there in Northeast DC tend to be jumpy on the ol' trigger finger.
In fact, all around our great nation, you get to keep all the Blue voters who’ve made urban war zones like downtown Detroit--a Blue bastion, of course--the proud showplaces they are today.
We get the rest of Blue states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Illinois and...well, frankly, just about every state in the Union with the exception of Hawaii and New England--and even there, we’ll just hang on to a couple of chunks of New Hampshire and Connecticut.
You’re especially more than welcome to Rhode Island, which will immediately set up some sort of money-laundering scheme and bilk the rest of you once it has been incorporated into whatever sort of muddle-headed utopia you’re trying to create.
The former mayor of Providence should be out of Federal prison in time to join your Politburo and help you get things set up--for a small consulting fee, of course
If you would please, take another look at the list of best beaches and notice what color states they are in. We'll miss the Hawaiian beaches, but since long stretches of coastline from New Jersey down to Florida and yes, even in Southern California (including San Diego, thanks) are actually in Red counties, we'll be fine.
Sure, we get the rednecks and holy rollers. But since you're apparently willing to trade them for the gangs and psychopaths terrorizing your Blue cities, what can we say? You want the Crips and the Bloods in low riders raking your streets with automatic gunfire, and you're offering us Bubba heading off to church in his pickup?
Hey, a deal's a deal. Done.
True, you also get Manhattan, but darn the luck, you have to take the rest of the city, including the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn too, as well as Long Island, which is enough to almost make us feel sorry for you all out there in New California. (Almost.)
For our part, we’ll take most of the rest of gorgeous New York State, although you get the scam artists who infest the legislature in Albany.
And since for some unfathomable reason you actually want Elliot Spitzer, we’ll buy his plane ticket as a gesture of goodwill.
So that’s the deal. You get the cities, with all the crime, crack mommies, and corruption you can stand.
And sure, you get many of the elite colleges too, with the professors who think that terrorists in Fallujah are freedom fighters and that the people who worked in the Twin Towers on 9/11 were no better than Nazis—forgive us for not lamenting over this loss.
We get the suburbs, the countryside, and all the other beautiful places that remain unspoiled by liberal hypocrisy and addle-brained social experimentation.
And we'd like a favor, too: please keep your sky-high tax and crime rates, since we're happy to have the corporations and jobs that continue to flee your Blue cities into our Red counties. It's much appreciated, since our unemployment rates, to say nothing of our crime, single-parenting, and illiteracy rates, are far lower than yours.
Oh, and one last thing. We get the U.S. military, too. Did we mention that part? (You may have forgotten that they're volunteers, and most are happy Red state voters.)
Not to worry, though, since we’re sure that Islamic fundamentalist terrorists will be more than happy to reach an accommodation with a society that embraces radical feminism, gay marriage, gun control, hostility to organized religion of any kind, and Salman Rushdie. Good luck with that.
But one day when some misogynist Saudi freak--who no doubt will sneak into your country by strolling over the northern border after a few years sucking on the Canadian welfare system you all admire so much--blows up a couple kilos of plutonium on Sunset Boulevard, go send Sean Penn to ask the French for help. We’ll be busy that day.
Sincerely,
The Red States
PS: You can keep the marijuana. You're going to need it, since selling it is one of the last stable industries left in Blue counties.
Thanks for the Red State reply, Anonymous. Even though it was written in 2005, somehow I sense more anger, not a lot of humor in there. It's liberals that fought and are still fighting for the all the clean air and water that pepper our bucolic countrysides. Let's not forgot that.
I love your letter & blog!!! Unfortunately, I ended up reading the comments and that other unfortunate letter.
Sad for them, I am :). No, not really! Thanks for this blog!
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