After the election, people around the country flooded the White House’s official petition website with petitions asking to secede from the Union. Because that’s what you do when you lose, you take your ball and go home. And while it’s a ridiculous waste of resources, clogging up servers and forcing the White House to comment (which they do on any petition that gets 25,000 signatures), we’re intrigued by a hyperlocal secession petition, attempting to separate East Williamsburg from Williamsburg.
The petition points out that the original class of Williamsburg gentrifiers, fleeing the increasingly expensive East Village, have now themselves been pushed east by the monied interests that followed them. In their own words:
“As such, the grittier East Williamsburg would prefer to disassociate from Williamsburg as a fully separate and independent neighborhood. The people of East Williamsburg actually have real jobs. Their shops are not particularly fashionable. Some of the bars are genuinely dangerous dives. Please allow the neighborhood to secede.”
Right now the petition isn’t in any danger of making an impact, with only six signatures on it. But it may be better for the White House to try to mediate this now, before we have a Fort Sumter moment, and the Third Fixie Brigade raises the East Williamsburg flag over the Graham Avenue L stop. And if there’s any man that can solve this vexing issue, it is of course Barack Obama, since he’s our first hipster president.
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Far more pressing secession.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/allow-bar-jackies-5th-amendment-secede-neighborhood-park-slope-brooklyn-ny/3QsQ9K4G