Opinions

Resisting urges for schism

In print | March 26, 2009

Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran an article about a nascent California separatist movement. Apparently, a faction of inland agricultural counties wants to break away from the more liberal coastal areas in order to free farmers from animal rights ballot initiatives that originate in less agrarian places like San Francisco and Los Angeles. The story sounds like a lost collaboration between George Orwell and John Steinbeck.

But it is real. And though the movement is far from gaining much political traction, the cultural rifts that have impelled this group of rural dwellers to push for “downsizing” California are serious ones that deserve immediate attention.

The main concern of Citizens for Saving California Farming Industries, the organization that has launched the campaign, is the imposition of agricultural regulations and taxes popular among liberal city dwellers but abhorred by many farmers and agricultural industry workers. For the group, the most recent outrage was the passage of the Standards for Confining Animals initiative, which mandated minimum pen requirements for egg-laying hens, veal calves and pregnant pigs.

According to the group’s website, however, such animal cruelty measures only scratch the surface of the problem. In a litany of complaints, the group’s website deplores the “radicals” who are “sympathetic to illegals and criminals” and the “expenditures on non-citizens, employment displacement and generational welfare rolls [that] are leaving a massive, ongoing debt to our children, grandchildren and their children’s children.”

Thus, it becomes clear that the controversy is bigger even than gratuitously large sow pens. The underlying preoccupation is a libertarian impulse that has been aggravated by California’s liberal-leaning majority. At face value, the proposed solution seems reasonable because it allows for better representation of citizens who wish to limit government’s reach into the private realm. Nor is this sort of thing unprecedented in America; West Virginia, Maine and Kentucky all exist because they seceded from other states.

But the knee-jerk reaction to separate yourself from those with whom you disagree is troubling. Self-determination is guaranteed in the United States, but democratic government requires self-determination on a collective level. There are many good reasons to avoid the decomposition of states into city-states and provincial districts — the most important one being the essential balance produced by competing values and interests.

Despite what Obama says, there are a de facto red America and blue America. The color coding, however, has less to do with election night maps than the basic differences in values, conventions and attitudes toward government that cleave America into urban/suburban/rural modes of thinking. And the fact that we have to coexist isn’t such a curse.

As an example, let’s return to the farming issue. State governments that have representatives from farming communities and non-farming communities benefit from the many viewpoints that must be considered when determining agricultural policy and food regulations. Dialectic forms, and it can produce more comprehensive policy and inform each side of the considerations that cause farmers and eaters to think the way they do.

It is completely in the interest of consumers to be more aware and involved in the process of raising livestock, the standards of slaughter and packing, and the modes of transportation and refrigeration that ultimately deliver food to grocery stores. Such participation should be especially encouraged in light of food-borne diseases and obesity concerns. For farmers, the obligation to draw up policy with consumer groups provides a crucial forum to present their side of the story: the complexities of agricultural techniques, the cost-effectiveness of various methods, and the gritty realities of livestock production that most farmers have long grown accustomed to but often shock consumers.
Hopefully the impulse for schism will not trump this necessary dialogue.

Will is a first-year. You can reach him at wglovin1@swarthmore.edu.