One of the side benefits to joining the NRA (see my embarrassed confession in a previous weblog post) was the offer of a free duffle bag. Who doesn’t need a way to carry more stuff around? At any rate, it showed up the other day, a cute mini-duffel that looks like it might make a decent range bag or handle enough gear for an overnight. The only glaring problem was its logo. This leftist certainly wasn’t going to be caught with N-R-A in giant white letters on his luggage! The only question was, which patch to sew over it?

I’d recently gotten some Cascadia liberation patches from cascadianow.org and selected one for cover up duty. It wasn’t hard to choose. I used the rainbow gay pride version of the classic tri-color, superimposed with a Douglas fir tree. One could hardly imagine a better counter against socially regressive messages from the NRA. However, it’s not as oppositional as some suppose.

A major intellectual thinker behind the modern Cascadian successionist movement was the writer Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012). In 1975, this Berkely professor published a book called Ecotopia, concerning his vision for the Pacific Northwest breaking away from the US and forming an independent nation. As the title suggests, this new country focused on bringing ecological balance back to the bio-region, with a great deal of economic equality and various other progressive values as well.

However, Callenbach didn’t buy into, what at the time, was a relatively new crusade among liberals, that of gun control. In his imagined society, the military was largely replaced by militia units and citizens were expected to form the bulk of self defense forces. Firearms abounded, but as with the examples of Switzerland, Israel and Canada, greater social equality translated into low interpersonal violence, despite their availability.

Several years ago, I corresponded with Callenbach in the course of a book review for my old ‘zine AGCR, and questioned him on that front. He explained that he came from rural Pennsylvania and grew up in countryside where everyone had firearms and there was little crime, so for him, it never made sense to blame guns, and carried that idea into his writing.

In the end, I thank the NRA for their bag, but am proud it now represents a much more noble ideal. That the citizens of Cascadia should be free to choose their own destiny, whether it remains part of the greater US or not, with equality and respect for all. Armed or unarmed. Gay or straight. Douglas fir or Pacific red cedar.