Epiphanies: Revisiting Old Ideas with New Insights

I had a political epiphany this week regarding secession and the U.S. Civil War.

People like to say that the Confederacy was traitorous and treasonous because they were rebels. The idea is that they rebelled against the standing and duly elected U.S. government because they weren’t allowed to secede.

Often left unsaid or generally avoided by many people is that the Founders were also traitors because they too were rebels.

At any rate, I long agreed with the idea. My position could be summed up as “So?” with a sweeping gesture toward the rebellion committed by the Founding Fathers.

But I also held for a long time that states were allowed to secede, based on Lincoln’s 1848 speech regarding Mexico as well as the 10th Amendment.  The former says in pertinent part, “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.”

And I never saw the nonsensical dichotomy of those two positions.

If they were allowed to secede, then they weren’t traitors. It’s not treason to do something you’re allowed to do, right? “But hold on, Bob. Where does The Constitution say that a state can secede?”

The answer is that it doesn’t. But it also doesn’t prohibit a state from seceding. And under the 9th Amendment, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

And because the federal government wasn’t given the power to kick a state out of the Union, nor were the states forbidden to do so, that power, according to the 10th Amendment, was reserved to the states.

This journey along the secession rabbit trail was triggered by a Reddit post in the Libertarian subreddit. It linked to a Substack piece that talks about the debatable idea that the secession question was answered by the Civil War and Texas V White. I don’t think we should consider it settled, not if we’re intellectually honest about the idea.

(Side note: Who knew the author of the Pledge of Allegiance was a Christian socialist? They left that part out of my public education.)

And according to this piece at the Mises Institute, even Thomas Jefferson supported secession.

Do I think secession is likely? No, not likely. Could it happen? I think it could, and that it could even happen peacefully. But I don’t think it’s probable. It’s an interesting thought experiment though.

Getting Sirius About Music

My new-to-me Malibu came with a free three-month subscription to SiriusXM, which I’ve been making use of these last few weeks. I thought I’d focus on the jazz channels since I like jazz and there aren’t any good terrestrial jazz stations in the area. But one day I started listening to The Spectrum, and I really like it.

The channel is branded as “The Spectrum of Rock, spanning more than six decades – from the legends of the 1960s and ’70s to the artists breaking through now.” You can go from David Bowie’s “Heroes” to Mt Joy’s “Highway Queen” to Kings of Leon’s “Nowhere to Run.” And it turns out you can follow the channel via this playlist on Spotify without having to subscribe to either service.

The best part of The Spectrum for me is the exposure to new bands. I’m firmly planted in 80s music. The official name for the genre is “Classic Rock,” which means I’m old. Journey. Bob Seger. Night Ranger. Bon Jovi. Def Leppard. Queen. Those are the bands I grew up listening to, and I still listen to a lot of the old stuff.

But I want to hear from new bands, too. One way I do that now is to skim YouTube and look for covers of songs I like, like “Don’t Stop Believing.” It works well enough, but I like the idea of something like The Spectrum.

How do you find new music? What’s your favorite streaming service? Let me know in the comments.

Writing

The last couple of weeks, I’ve met the grandkids at their bus and hung out with them for a couple of hours until their dad got home. That usually involved me hanging out on the couch as they have a snack, play on their phones, or get their homework done.

I discovered something though. Another epiphany, if you will.

Suddenly it was easier for me to write.

In the four days I’ve been over at their place, I’ve written 2,550 words. That’s more fiction than I’ve written for most of this year. And it’s real progress, mostly in After, not just notes in the various outlines I have going.

So what’s making this happen?

Other than the location, the only thing I’m doing differently is picking up some Diet Dr. Pepper each day I watch them. I pretty much quit drinking it about a year ago, wanting to see if the dark soda was affecting my kidney function at all. According to my lab results, it wasn’t. But making the switch saved us a little bit of money at the grocery store, so I resorted to only drinking it on “special occasions,” like trips up to Tulsa, or hanging out with the grandkids, or something like that.

Maybe the caffeine is helping me?

I’m not sure how the different setting helps, though. It’s a deep, comfy couch. There’s a cat who will stop by and say hello when I sit down. One of the groandaughters granddaughters likes to curl up practically right on top of me, scrolling YT Shorts and IG Reels. Her older sister sits over on the other couch, and Grandson floats around. Sometimes the older granddaughter will draw, sculpt Play-Do, or create something out of paper and glue (she’s crazy talented that way).

You’d think that with this noisy environment, I’d find it too distracting to focus, but the first time I went over there, I settled in and cranked out 500 words, despite having to ask the younger one to turn the sound down a couple of times.

Was it just the difference between sitting at my desk and sitting somewhere else?

Maybe?

Aside from the sitting position, the other big variance is that I don’t have my desktop computer sitting there to distract me. I always try to write on my smaller HP laptop. But I do almost everything else on the big MSI machine with its secondary monitor. It’s very easy to get distracted by YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, or some other website. When I’m parked somewhere else and writing on the HP, I find it easier to open the browser, research that one thing I need to know for a paragraph, and then close the browser.

When I sit down at the MSI, I open Firefox with five or six tabs, and leave it open almost all day. Surely, I’m not the only writer to do that, right? Don’t we all leave multiple tabs running just in case we need to check Facebook?

No? Just me?

Hmm.

In any event, I’m exploring differing writing situations. I wrote most of this post either at the grandchildren’s place or sitting on our living room recliner. The words flowed surprisingly easily, even considering the wide variety of topics. I didn’t drink much Diet Dr. Pepper though, in the interests of only adjusting one variable at a time.

Let’s see how this goes.

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