I think almost everything important that's ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened. Good things and bad things: ending slavery, ending child labor, women voting, etc.

I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.

Imagine Jon Stewart if he gave a damn. He's like Howard Zinn after 12 beers.

Breaking the United States up into a number of pieces could be very good for the integration of those new nations with the rest of the world and the international law whose primary enemy is now the United States government. I think that it would be very good for democracy, for people to be within some hundreds of miles of their nation's capital, as they are in many other countries, so that they didn't have to travel thousands of miles to protest, to exercise their First Amendment rights, but that is the current state of affairs in this overly large, imperial nation.

Climate change is so unimaginable that most Americans deny it's happening.

Many militarists would like to see California's votes vanish from the national electoral system, which would then become more Republican.

California, like anywhere else on Earth, should have the right to secede whether the United States likes it or not. The preferences of the other 49 states and Washington DC is not relevant. That was the position of the United States government on Yugoslavia and other places around the world but not on Ukraine. However, morality and the law as I understand it are that any people should have the right to leave, just as explained in the initial words of the US Declaration of Independence.