Secession, Anyone?
Alberta is poised to hold a referendum on seceding from Canada later this year, and supporters of independence credit Trump’s disruptive energy for adding fuel to their movement.
—Wall Street Journal, February 2026.
Consider this: if you would ever try
To take an oblong tray that’s full of water
Clear across a room, you would surely
Spill a lot of it before you’re done.
But if you put dividers in the tray,
It is simplicity itself to move
Without a single droplet being spilled.
And so with much of life, division solves
The problems and improves the end results.
Books are best divided into chapters,
Homes improve divided into rooms,
Battleships are made more difficult
To sink by being separated into
Insulated cubicles, and even
Finches in Galapagos survived
When over ages they divided into
Fourteen different species, each one with
Its separate niche of food and cover, finding
They would all die off if they remained
A single species after a single prey.
And so it is with forms of government:
The city-states of Greece, the villages
And towns of Europe in medieval times,
The townships of New England in its early
Days, in religious settlements of sects—
In all of these the peace was kept and feuds
And such allayed, not by fights and wars,
And not by forced adherence to a single
Tenet or belief, but by division:
Fission, separation, segmentation,
Parting, resettlement, secession, and
Divorce.
In Dinka villages when feuds
Broke out between one family and another,
Daily life would suffer and one of them
Would be encouraged to go resettle elsewhere
Down the valley, the parting maybe lightened
With a parting gift, a cow or two.
In eighteenth-
Century New England fission was
So common it became the greatest part
Of business with the government in Boston,
Since by law you had to get the state’s
Permission to establish separate towns.
One typical petition from the town
Of Dunstable explained, “We are but small,
But we believe a small society
Well unified may more easily
Go through such business as the building of
A meeting house and choosing a minister
Than a greater number when there’s nothing but
Discord and disaffection.”
In Switzerland,
A place where regions have divided up
For seven centuries, the guiding precept
Has always been to satisfy the wishes
Of minorities by territory
Rather than go through the endless rounds
Of a territory’s “rights.” Let’s take canton
Appenzell as one example there.
While nations all around were fighting their
Imbrued religious wars in the aftermath
Of Europe’s Reformation, Catholics versus
Protestants, it just divided up:
The Lutheran minority chose
To make itself the new community
Of Ausser Rhoden, while the Catholics
Stayed behind as what became the Inner
Rhoden, and thus they lived in peace the next
Five hundred years.
So thus we come to one inevitable decision.
To solve the problems of this weary world: division.
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