Damn I'm pissy and argumentative.

This has nothing to do with France beyond my initial implication that I think that what's happening in France could happen in the US, based on my personal emotions, if for different reasons. The basis for those reasons is irrelevant.

As to whether or not it actually would happen I don't know. I often wonder about what impact the size of the US has on its populace. Nowhere else in the world is there a region so large with a unified language. (Might Russia? I don't know much about the languages throughout Asian Russia.) I think it's much harder for us to see each other as being vastly different when we share largely the same culture and it's so easy for us to communicate and travel. Compare that with Europe, a place with three-fifths the land mass and well over twice as many people. At the same time, it's easy for us to think of Europeans as different. They're inaccessible and most of them speak languages we'll never know. Even I am horribly US-centric because I don't know anything else. Cris can take a vacation and drive all the way around Europe, but similar people in the US will, at the extreme, visit some other states, and they're not really all that different. There isn't anything here that's been here for more than a few hundred years -- an age which to Europe is brand new.

I'm not sure what my point is, really, but I think this country makes us something wildly different from what Europeans are, both from psychology and logistics, both positive and negative. If this were to happen in the US, it would take a wildly different form.