The Pentagon is supposed to be under civilian control and it ought to be up to the people of the United States, not the profiteers.

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.

Activism has always been the driving force for change.

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'm not convinced that the people of Arizona as a nation couldn't do better to protect equal rights for all than the people of Arizona as part of the United States, which is actually not helping them much.

The United States has been becoming worse year after year after year for decades, and it's guaranteed to continue down that path if we don't change something.

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.