By Harry Holdorf, Guest Columnist
My fellow Mericans, after 250 years, we are no longer simply a united collection of states; we are a people, deserving a distinctive name. Let’s call ourselves Mericans.
In the Western World, there’s North, Central and South America. In North America, there’s Greenland, then Canada, then Merica and then Mexico. You may ask, “Why did we remove the big ‘A’ from our name?” It’s simple: because the great bulk of us want to stop acting like A’s as a whole.
We all know what the idea of clean living is in theory, but in practice it is considerably more difficult. I recently shot some pool with my son, Elan. He’s a stickler for details and playing by BCA rules. He says you’re either playing by the rules or you’re practicing.
It dawned on me: Elan plays by the rules, because he seeks perfection. In pool, perfection is important. When Elan’s warmed up, his shots go right down the middle of the pockets.
Before the Second World War, much of our country was horse-powered. To withstand the withering global attacks from the powerful German, Japanese and Italian fascists, we were forced to mechanize our culture as rapidly and thoroughly as possible; so the whole world turned to long-dead dinosaurs – oil and gas – to empower our boats, tanks and airplanes.
Unfortunately, by the war’s end in 1945, Russia, our great communist ally to the East, after losing 50 million soldiers and civilians, turned solidly totalitarian and engaged us in an enduring Cold War, approaching 100 years now. This global fight for world domination kept everyone using massive amounts of gas and oil for the needed horsepower to keep up with each other.
With 21st-century arrival, our technologies have progressed to the point where we can end our reliance on dead dinosaur juice to haul us around. Indeed, our greatest sin is our willful participation in the destruction of the earth itself.
We’ve been burning oil so long, turning billions of cubic feet of clean air into ozone, just to get to the store to buy a gallon of milk. I’m increasing the electric vehicle tax credit to $10,000 per vehicle on Merican-made non-polluting vehicles.
Renaming the Gulf of America makes sense; even regaining control of the canal in Panama makes sense. Can we use low-radiation nuclear bombs to blast the canal open for today’s larger ships?
My most exciting plans are for the 2,000-mile-long Mexican/Merican border. Each country federalizes the 40 miles on their side, moving all private properties more than 40 miles back into their countries.
Then, this 80-mile wide, 2,000-mile-long strip of mostly barren desert would be turned into 160,000 square miles of lush, mostly edible greenery, powered by 16,000 square miles of solar panels, using pipelines of de-salted water from desalination plants on the shores of the Gulf of America and Pacific Ocean.
May God, again, bless the United States of Merica.
The writer is a resident of Blairsville, Ga.