A few years ago I went up and down a handful of municipalities along the Connecticut River (mostly in northern Vermont and New Hampshire) speaking on the topic of secession. Having dipped my toes into the waters of the New Hampshire liberty movement’s attempt at a “national divorce,” I thought “maybe simply starting from scratch could be an even better idea.”
Never one to back down to a challenge, I more or less decided to spend valuable (and invaluable) time with this movement after one of the legislators in Concord rudely told those at the CACR 20 hearing, “You people have no plan. Where’s your plan!?” I thought to myself, “Hmm, OK friend, you want a plan, I’ll give you a plan.”
Those early endeavors led eventually to a concept based on the idea of turning New Hampshire into a North American variant of the Swiss peoples. Neutral, well-armed, superb cheese …. and shady. Surely to panic my children’s school community, elementary schoolers drawing images of New Switzerland’s flag on their notebooks drew more than a few curious glances. Understandable, because never had I been at meetings so fishy as those which function as casual discourses on the topic of destruction. Golden gems of comment there are too many to count, but one worth sharing is the response I received to my inquiry as to what would happen to those who didn’t want secession if it were actually to be moved forward. Short and sweet, the man replied, “Uh, we’d let them leave.” I thought to myself, “these people may actually be crazier than I am.”
As the story goes, these things die on the vine as soon as the fruit begins to ripen. Our electronic world’s success in making us believe “digital security” is more important than in-person relationships worked its magic once again; this time on the Granite State. Absent are the chairs for those who understand why secession was ever brought up in the first place, though what supplied the wood may be too painful to digest.
Walking with my children during the lockdowns of 2020, I remember our long discussions up and down that Vermont country road. Fortune had that I was primarily in charge of their care at that time, so pandemic-related questions abounded (just as they did everywhere else). Having felt the often uncomfortable experience with both adamant pro-mask and adamant anti-mask, and then with convinced pro-vaccine and convinced anti-vaccine, all I could really say at the time is that our nation was turning into a place where there were two sides who could not find a civil compromise, and it may serve us well to be observant and thoughtful in how we lived and interacted with the world at large.
I don’t think I would have said it if I hadn’t had felt it. From some deli clerk at a Brattleboro grocery ordering me to raise my mask above my nose, to anarcho-capitalists expounding conspiracies related to vaccination, the road seemed to become thinner for those walking the middle path. As one season leads to another, I pondered over the well-dammed river which flowed in between two foliaged states who appeared to me as mirrored (though inverted) images of each another.
Taking a road trip with my two children up to the edge of our United States, I gave a public comment in a local New Hampshire town on the issue of secession; providing them with a white paper on something I christened “The Connecticut River Eight Project.”
Essentially, I took my world travels and mixed those in some part with my poor man’s sociology degree, and came up with the closest substitute I could think up to an “American” government, but with decisions resting more on a local level. Standing with eight elected members, this theoretical governing body was pitched as being a dead-on insurance policy for protecting our irreplaceable liberties while also vacating a corrupted centralized federal government; three pillars … worked before. The council would be organized in a similar fashion to local selectboards; each member representing the body proper at meetings dedicated to local community and regional-government (boards, commissions, etc.).
What responses did I receive? Ha, you can probably guess. Bewilderment. Fear. Curiosity. It was almost as if I was performing an act. Shoot, I probably was … but aren’t we all?
At the second hearing for New Hampshire secession, I testified that most folks will go along with whatever government is in place until it isn’t. And who really cares about Jeffrey Epstein, anyway?
Amhad Esfahani lives in Greenfield.