[ WP ] A civil war had broken out across all over modern America . Bombs have been dropped , crime is rampant , and lives have been destroyed . Write a diary or journal entry of someone caught in this aftermath .

It started so peacefully, but it ended in bloodshed. I was a college student when the first serious cooperative communes began organizing in California. While they didn ’ t make the profits the regular corporations did, they provided for their communities and did a whole hell of a lot of good for your average Joe. Politics and Economics are tight bed-fellows though, and when the co-ops started to ask for limited political autonomy things started to get ugly. Unfortunately by the very nature of the communes their economic power was next to nill outside of their own communities and none of the proposed legislation passed. 
 
 
 We learned to bide our time, slow conversion was our ally, one small town after another reorganized under principles dating as far back as Rochdale. Eventually virtually every town on the western seaboard had at least one cooperative corp. A grassroots political party known as the Samaritan Party grew in power, and over the next decade legislation was passed that made cooperative corporations the main economic unit from California to Washington. The Samaritans brought democratic workplace reforms along with social ones, within the decade people were living up to their true potential. 
 
 
 The rest of the country didn ’ t see it that way. With their grip on media outlets most of the rest of the US was turned against the Samaritan Party by the growing Corporate Oligarchy in the East. Despite our best efforts the Samaritan Party was confined to California, Washington, Oregon, and Nevada. Over the next decade our culture and economy grew so separate from the rest of the US that we decided the best way to preserve our way of life was to secede. Despite our best efforts to reform the system from within there was too much corruption and dead weight. 
 
 
 In solidarity we took our case to Washington ( DC of course ). There were no riots or violent protests in the first few weeks, just confinement and media blackout. Of course they couldn ’ t keep the presence of several hundred thousand demonstrators and a proposal for secession secret for very long. In come the false flag groups, criminals paid to paint our demonstrations in blood and lay the blame on us. No one bought it, the Oligarchy still hadn ’ t quite caught up to the new realities of the information age. We had planned for this eventuality and had tagged each demonstrator with GPS trackers and patterned insignias. We could account for each and every person at all times and could disavow any planted trouble maker. 
 
 
 The proposal for secession failed to pass, and negotiations went sour real fast. It began to be mentioned that Nevada had some of the US ’ s most up-to-date nuclear research teams, and that there were missile silos in California and Washington. With the threat of nuclear weapons the US tried to take control of these silos, sending in its own squads to combat the State Militias in place. That was when it was announced that to defend its own interests a violent offshoot of the Samaritan Party had obtained weaponized samples of ebola and smallpox ( we also happen to have some of the country ’ s best biological warfare research groups ). This group, named the Pacific Liberation Front, PLC, claimed to have planted dispersion systems for these agents in many of the major cities of the USA. They threatened to activate these weapons unless secession was granted. 
 
 
 Fifteen of the twenty devices were found and deactivated over the next 20 hours, during the following four the rest activated. Over 100 million people died of disease over the next few months, with casualties on both sides. Military retaliation was swift, and the horrors of war followed, death, destruction, and despair. We defended our own territory, never striking back into the USA except to disable purely military targets with minimal loss of life. Our military focused on disabling groups of soldiers and taking them hostage, rather than killing them. The soldiers were treated with as much respect and care as could be afforded. They were educated in the realities of our lifestyle and many joined us after seeing the truth of our culture for the first time. 
 
 
 I was a historian by trade, and now in the aftermath of the War of Secession I travel gathering personal accounts of the conflict. Though we won, and Cascadia ( the name of our new nation ) is prosperous and peaceful again, there is much unrest in our neighbor as many returning soldiers have seen how we live and wish to build a similar life for themselves. Through hardship and war we ’ ve given birth to a new nation on this continent, one that aims to defend and exemplify the principles its old government had long forsaken, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

