Understanding the United States of America
Time-travel with me to a time when the states weren't united. Massachusetts, where my family lived after they left England, might has well have been another country as compared to, say, New York. These places were founded by people who were not happy with being told what to do by a king, and the essential fabric of the fierce independence of what would some day become the United States was firmly set.
Unfortunately, England was not happy with the behavior of some of the colonies, especially their unwillingness to pay taxes. The people in Boston had angered a very powerful country, and they really were too small to defend themselves. The idea, of course, was to unite the 13 colonies to create an army that would be powerful enough to fight back, and they did. A colony going to war with their own country is treason, and Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said, "If we don't all hang together, we will all hang separately". And yes, treason was a hanging offense, and all of the people that we know as founder fathers were at risk for their lives.
You know the rest of the story, the United States won. George Washington led an army which fought against terrible odds. The army was the Continental Army, which is how the people there thought of themselves. They had been working on self-government for a long time. Google how many presidents there were before George Washington, and you'll see. They didn't consider themselves colonials, they were Continentals. And the states pulled together.
Nowadays, of course, we tend to think of the states as not really being all that different. I can travel from here in Arizona to California without a concern for a passport, or using different currency, or any of the stuff we associate with going from one country to another. I may have to have avocado on my burgers, and I have to stop for pedestrians, but other than a few trivial differences, states are pretty much the same.
During the Civil War, the tension between the states flared up, and the United States was almost split in two. This tension remains to this day, with states worried that their voices will be drowned out. Over the years there have been put in place so many ways to try to make everyone happy that it's a bewildering tangle of laws, rules, and regulations. But it all has to do with states' rights.
When I was a kid, 100 years after the Civil War, schoolchildren were still pledging their allegiance to the United States of America, to the flag, and to the Republic for which it stands. Nowadays you really don't hear too much about that, because as a union, the United States has stood.
North, south, east, west, these are the United States!
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