It’s All Fun Until Someone Loses An Eye
This is all the rage in America these days, to set up autonomous zones right within the center of a large, urban metropolis. It’s working so well in Seattle that the idea has spread faster than the Covid virus to other cities as well, with Nashville being the latest aspirant. But burgeoning nations states are brewing in Texas and Georgia as well.
Parents will recognize this as playing Barbie dream house for the girls or in the case of the boys, building a fort in the basement during their own simpler youth. You simply arranged a few cardboard boxes as barricades and voila, instant play zone. Using their fertile imaginations, kids could create their own worlds and and pretend scenarios…up until the time their parents called them to clean up for dinner.
As some pundits have noted, it’s been pretty easy to create a new nation state since there hasn’t been a lot of pushback by those who would be most affected. Wait, what…I’m no longer in the U.S.?? Thus far, the plucky nation builders have managed to arbitrarily carve out pieces of cities to be declared self governing zones independant of the host cities and limited only by the amount of concrete barriers they can get their hands on. It’s as if the kids gathered some folding chairs in the basement and declared the boundaries to be impassible to outsiders. They seem to think that their new zone is so desirable that walls are needed to keep wanna be citizens away. Hmm.
In Seattle, city officials, who are notionally charged and paid to protect the citizenry, are instead indulging the plucky nationalists by offering support items such as food, Gatorade and of course cigarettes as if they were permissive parents supporting their children’s fantasies. In fact, there’s quite a list of demands to the outsiders for all kinds of support items including soy and vegan items but with soap being notably absent. We could dub this zone, state of caricature or SOC instead of CHAZ….or perhaps Soapless In Seattle.
How could this not seem fun to people who would copy this idea? Given that the support demands are being met for all kinds of creature comforts including WiFi and portable toilets, why wouldn’t you hang out and play bongos with like minded people, or more correctly, fellow citizens of the new state? It’s like living in your mom’s basement, adult version. Taking the advice of a former President who infamously invoked “You didn’t build that” the new nationalists are nevertheless living under the figurative roof of those that provide the comfort of their new digs. Except in this case, you get to wield real guns instead of fake ones and you really get to boss people around.
It’s fun, intoxicating and the publicity and notoriety are a large part of the charm in this world of make believe for the heroic nationalists. Who wouldn’t want to act out childish fantasies as an adult without fear of consequences? But, just like when they were kids, the adults will eventually want to have their room back and those not complying may get the adult version of a deserved spanking. In wisdom apparently rooted as far back as Roman times, “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”.