Dan's Papers - July 3, 2009

Long Island is making moves to secede from New York and become the 51st state. Up in Albany, our two East End representatives, Senator Kenneth LaValle and Assemblyman Fred Thiele, have put a motion on the table requesting that a task force be created to look into the possibility. Thiele says his phone has been ringing off the hook since he proposed the bill. Everyone wants it.

Meanwhile, a State senator from Rochester is handing out questionnaires to all his colleagues asking, "Are you in favor or opposed to splitting New York into two states?" He hopes the answer is "opposed."

The issue is, as it once was in Boston Harbor, taxes. Not taxes on tea, but a new transportation payroll tax specifically on Long Islanders. A month ago, Albany turned this into law to bail out the MTA. Upstaters do not pay this tax. It costs Long Islanders an additional half billion dollars a year more than they pay now.

Long Islanders already pay $3 billion more in taxes to Albany than they get back. Upstaters receive $3 billion more in services than they put in. Now that gap widens to $3.5 billion. It is clearly not fair.

On the other hand, what is fair? Upstate is largely part of the rust belt and in great need of government money. Long Island, on the other hand, is among the five wealthiest demographic areas in America. Wouldn't it be fair for the rich folks to pay more and the poor folks pay less?

Did I hear a cheer that said "no?"

I don't know how far efforts in this direction are going to get, but problems do loom that could prevent this 51st state effort from succeeding.

For one thing, what, exactly, is Long Island? Geographically, there is little doubt what it is. Long Island, from the air, looks like a fish, with the head in the west snuggling up to Manhattan and 130 miles away the two flukes comprising the North and South Forks in the east, pointing out into the Atlantic Ocean.

And yet, often, you see a truck drive by which has a sign on the side that says Long Island Roofing or Long Island Electric and below the sign there is a map of Long Island with its head bitten off. Why? Brooklyn and Queens may be geographically on Long Island, but they are politically part of the City of New York. The rest of Long Island - Nassau and Suffolk Counties - are what is officially Long Island, according to politicians.

This is nonsense. Geographical hocus-pocus.

Since the beginning of time, or anyway since the beginning of the United States of America, Long Island was Long Island. In the Revolution, General Washington faced off against General William Howe to fight the Battle of Long Island in 1776. Washington lost the fight and his troops ran off, truth be told, but the point is that the battle was fought at several locations that, today, would not be considered part of Long Island, even though they were fought ON Long Island. One encounter occurred with the colonists atop the Guana Heights, which was in Flatbush. The rest of the fight took place at Brooklyn Heights, with the colonists finally retreating across the East River to Manhattan during a thick pre-dawn fog.

We Long Islanders would surely have to reclaim our heritage if we were to become a state. Lindbergh took off from an airfield in Nassau County. The astronaut's moon walker was built in Suffolk County. The battle of Long Island was fought in Brooklyn, now renamed Kings County. WE WILL HAVE TO RETAKE BROOKLYN AND QUEENS BY FORCE.

After we do, we will make the City of Brooklyn our capital. Brooklyn, for more than a hundred years, was a separate city from the City of New York. It was the biggest city on Long Island. And it was not part of New York City. New York City absorbed Brooklyn in 1898. That's when the head got bitten off. Brooklyn's magnificent City Hall was shut down. All the other official looking buildings befitting a City were also shut down, and then all reopened, only partially occupied as official New York Borough buildings. Today, these magnificent buildings STILL are not fully used. And Queens went along with this business.

Brooklyn should be the pride of Long Island, as it once was before it got absorbed. Brooklyn, Long Island. Just rolls right of the tongue, doesn't it? A city of 2.6 million would be the fifth largest in the United States, overseeing the State of Long Island, which, with Brooklyn and those suburban do-do me-tooers in Queens, would rank as the 17th largest state in the union by population.

The Brooklyn Dodgers would come back. The Brooklyn Eagle daily newspaper would come back. Citi Park would be ours. It would make Steven Ratner, who is rebuilding downtown Brooklyn with skyscrapers and bringing the Nets to that City, proud. The Brooklyn Nets. Or the Long Island Nets. Kinda rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Certainly wouldn't be the New York Nets.

It's been done before, carving a new state out of an old one, you know. The people in the mountainous part of Virginia seceded from those dandies in the eastern part in 1863, creating West Virginia. That worked. Others did it too, I think.

Could Long Island do it? There are issues that might baffle such an attempt. One is the fact that those of us here on the rural East End of Long Island pretty much don't want anything to do with the folks on the western end of Long Island. We East Enders keep to ourselves. Or, when we do relate to anything beyond our part of the world, it is to Manhattan. The Jitney takes us in and out from Manhattan. So does the railroad. Skyscrapers to sand dunes, is our mantra. And it wasn't for nothing that we East Enders built those big 20-foot wooden walls on the Long Island Expressway 15 years ago. We did not, and do not, want to have to look out on the West Enders when we drove or took the Jitney to Manhattan. Our rift with the West Enders would have to be healed. A little diplomacy perhaps. TAKE DOWN THAT WALL.

One final issue, and perhaps this is the killer that could bring this whole secession thing to a halt - I do hate to bring this up - but where the hell do we put the 51st star on the flag? Thirteen stars worked out pretty good in the beginning. We put them in a circle. Forty-eight stars worked out pretty good in perfect rows. And 50 stars worked out pretty good as handsome shifty little rows. But 51? The great scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, at Cold Spring Harbor, at Stony Brook University and at the Laboratory for Animal Research on Plum Island, all on Long Island, are working on this mathematical problem day and night as we speak. And if they can't resolve it, who can?