Dear San Bernardino County,

I understand your desire to leave California.

If you’re a Californian or a California entity and you haven’t thought of departure, then you probably don’t belong in the Golden State.

What I don’t understand is why you are asking your voters to endorse secession on the November ballot in order to make San Bernardino County its very own state, America’s 51st.

Because your biggest problem is that you’re too much like an American state.

You are the largest county in the U.S. by area, as big as West Virginia. With nearly 2.2 million people, you have more residents than New Mexico.

You are politically polarized and thus hard to govern, with no clear majority party. You’re plagued by economic inequality that matches that of Venezuela.

And you’re geographically divided into regions that have little in common.

Almost all of your people — some 80% — are packed into dense urbanized areas in your southwest corner, which is effectively part of suburban, metro Los Angeles. Another 400,000 of your residents live in the exurbs of the Victor Valley desert.

Now, I know the people leading your secession push — county supervisors, real estate developers — imagine that statehood will free you from Sacramento’s edicts. But don’t they read the papers? American states are at the mercy of a massively powerful, ever-expanding federal government.

It’s surprising that you don’t understand this, because you, San Bernardino County, are already under the federal thumb. Indeed, with all your national parks and wilderness areas, more than 80% of your land is owned by the U.S. government. Given these realities, statehood will only make you more of D.C. colony.

If you really want independence, you must think bigger: Why not become your own nation? That way, all that federal land would become yours to develop. And you could provide more services and invest more in your own infrastructure if you could print your own money.

Such a country could attract new residents, including this columnist. Given America’s decline, and the facts that my mom is a county native and that her family remain residents, I could imagine immigrating to Loma Linda and seeking citizenship in your new nation.

Sadly, it’s never going to happen. San Bernardino statehood would require a political miracle — the approval of the state of California, both houses of Congress and the president. But nationhood would be even harder.

So, you’ll have to resort to a second option: Don’t split from the state of California. Instead, split yourself up.

Since you hate being a county, why not sell yourself off, in pieces, to your neighbors? You’d find plenty of takers. California is overdue for a resetting of its county boundaries, which were mostly determined back in the late 19th century.

Many of your communities might do better under different management. Your cities near your western border, from Chino Hills up to Victorville, should return to Los Angeles, where they could be more easily linked to the growing Metro transit system.

Your mountain resorts and the cities on your southern border, including San Bernardino itself, might become more prosperous by joining up with Riverside County, which has been more successful economically than you for the past two generations.

You could pass off your empty desert precincts — everything north of Interstate 40 — to Inyo or Kern counties, which know how to govern empty spaces. And, in order to increase your housing supply, you could deed your land near the Nevada border to Clark County, whose dynamic developers would soon build new suburbs of Las Vegas.

Some might call this break-up the end of the county, but it actually would be a new beginning. And a rare win-win for your region. Your communities would find themselves with new options and possibilities. And you’d spare yourself the indignities of being a California county, or becoming an American state.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.