We’ll take our factories, financial services and banks, law firms and accountants, movie studios, ad agencies, our restaurants and clubs, our enormous parks and theater districts, our artists, writers and models, and our Jews and gays and hit the road. We’ll just see how much the prairie states like the films of Alabama – what they lack in plot they’ll make up for in rage. Mississippi can pay for its own Medicaid. North Dakota better watch its back from the suddenly rapacious oil barons of Canada. Missouri can keep Branson; we’ll take Broadway. 

Those of us in the newly created nation of URBANISTAN can pool our cash and buy things we actually want: livable teacher salaries, school repair, modern textbooks; subways and high speed trains; solar and wind power stations; collective bargaining, affordable universities; stem cell research; universal child care; sex education, free birth control, Medicare for all, clean power, safer mines, real anti-monopoly laws and a meaningful safety net. Marriage equality will get done on day two.  Of course, we’ll need a military and let’s be honest, kids from the cities don’t typically make up the bulk of military volunteers. We will need to adopt a required period of national service.

Urbanistan won’t be trouble free.  We won’t be sharing property or distributing wealth. After all, most of us love free enterprise and like material comforts and even toys. Everyone will be expected to work. But, we will take care of those unlucky souls who can’t work without bitterness.  We will fight with each other over power and money. But, we’ll have laws and working courts and legal representation for people at every level. We will support functional government. We will live in an imperfect, reality-based world. It won’t be utopia, but right now it sounds like heaven. 

Long Live Urbanistan!