Once in awhile someone will throw out the idea of Skid Row becoming her own City but the idea doesn’t go anywhere. But we are living in the Age of Trump and so when something doesn’t work you just take it to the next level.
I propose Skid Row become our 51st State. It is possible.
Article four Section three from the Constitution:
“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
And so Washington DC (Congress) and Sacramento would have to agree.
Of course this raises lots of questions and I’m not going to try and make a list of all of them let alone answer them. The reason I believe Skid Row is destined — as an unofficially official part of Mother Earth from Third to the North and Seventh to the South and Main to the West and either Central or Alameda to the East — to pursue Statehood is it would be so experimental. A Native American leader is trying to create an online 51st State for Native Americans with no land boundaries and so Skid Row pursuing Statehood is no more out of the box than that idea.
The Founding Fathers is a well known phrase and Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father, described William Penn as the Grandfather of America. Pennsylvania means “Penn’s Woods”.
Penn came to the New World in 1682. The land of Pennsylvania and Delaware was given to Penn’s father, an Admiral, as a gift by King George.
A devout Christian (Quaker), Penn resolved that his stewardship of Penn’s Woods required an honorable relationship with the Natives based on mutual respect. That relationship was built and maintained over the years and when Penn died his three sons eventually shattered that relationship in what became known as The Walking Purchase.
The three sons took an unfinished treaty to the Native leaders and pressured them to finish it. The final treaty said Penn’s sons would receive all the land that a man could walk in 36 hours.
The sons then held a widely publicized contest to see who could walk the fastest without running (what we call ‘power walking’) for 36 hours for a reward of a portion of the walked land. The contest was a success and the amount of land walked far exceeded what the Natives anticipated.
In huge letters around the rotunda in the Statehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are these words by William Penn:
“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment, for the nations want a precedent, and my God will make it the seed of a nation. That an example might be set up to the nations. That we may do the thing that is truly right and just.”
Time for another experiment.