I'm not actually from Vermont...

“The Second Vermont Republic is a nonviolent citizens' network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government, and committed to the return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly to the dissolution of the Union.”

Plans to secede were made over a friend’s dinner table one Friday night last summer. Obviously, something was seriously wrong with the United States, and the only remedy was to create a safe haven for, well, more people like us. California seemed like a good place to begin our revolution, until we decided that if the people there were crazy enough to ban smoking in bars, they weren’t to be trusted with their own sovereign nation. After toying briefly with the ideas of conquering Southern France (too French), Canada (too Canadian), and Hong Kong (too British), my friend and I set our sights on Vermont.

Vermont, whose original constitution had been drafted and ratified in a tavern over a period of four days, had been an autonomous republic from 1777 to 1791, and had already developed its own secessionist movement: The Second Republic of Vermont. Confident that the combined forces of two seventeen-year-old boys were sufficient to bring the laid-back Vermonters to heel, we drew up our plans for governance of our new Empire.

While chartering our new nation’s economic policy, we realized that without a coastal harbor to receive shipments of Subarus, our fledgling empire would crumble. After first planning to take over Massachusetts, mainly because “P-town is sweet,” it was decided that our newly-formed Vermont militia wouldn’t be able to effectively combat the Red Sox Nation if Boston were threatened.

New Hampshire, on the other hand, was a far more benign target, had our desperately-needed access to coastal waters, a world-class medical facility, and controlled the other bank of the Connecticut River, which would become a vital artery in our maple syrup, cheddar cheese, and marijuana trades. Bringing New Hampshire into The Empire would also make our new nation the only country outside the United States with an Ivy League college. Most importantly, New Hampshire/Vermont made a nearly perfect rectangle on a map, which would attract the world’s more geographically aware obsessive-compulsives to pursue citizenship.

Of course, the Department of Homeland Security’s belief that out recent machinations in Vermont are actually the product of Quebec’s own secessionist movement is evident by the DOHS’s plans to make the I-95 checkpoint a permanent installation. Obviously, both us and Al Qaeda will have to delay our plans to reestablish the fur trade.