Other Americans (2)
When I talk to Americans we discuss other places. Tasmania, Buenos Aires. What we think we know about Luxembourg. Montevideo comes up more often than you’d expect. Rumors that the Canadian government will pay us to move to Nunavut. Or at least give you a little two-track vehicle to get around on. They’re not big on roads. I'm not sure that's a strike against them.
My big concern, I say, is I don’t want to impose. Americans impose everywhere. It’s kinda what we do. But it’s not easy to just slip into a new place and culture and start laying bricks or whatever they might need me for.
Abu Dhabi. You can teach English there, they’ll give you a place to live, tax free, all the baba ganoush you can stand. Never fantasized about the Middle East before but sounds better than, I don't know, anywhere around Kansas City.
Dreamed about a caye off the coast of Belize I visited twenty years ago, woke up worrying about the person I was there with. Tiki bar with a wadeable rift that split the island in half. Legend was a lightning strike sundered the place.
Background script running at all times: where to flee
The list of acceptable places is shrinking. Everywhere they're finding ways to squeeze human rights. Only shocking in the U.S. because we're used it to it going the other way.
My good friend used to live and teach in Taiwan. Not the best destination if you’re conflict avoidant these days either. And then there's the general weirdness of China pretending to care about individual liberties to make the U.S. look even worse.
Talked to another friend in California, originally from Sao Paolo. Let’s go, I say. Aside from their having two daughters who were raised here and aren’t quite finished with school, it’s too dangerous, he says.
I think about Guatemalan villages we visited on the same trip where we went to Belize, the ones around the ruins. Our married friends were in the Peace Corps and they knew these places well. They had a colleague who went rogue and hitchhiked around the jungle with a walking stick, absorbing the local lore and stories and providing what she could in exchange for community.
Search: how move Tierra del Fuego
I want to be useful somewhere. I'd like to be useful at home. I'd like to believe that if I just show up in Chicago someone will put me to work fighting the good fight. I thought that last time too and ran facefirst into the pandemic with everyone else.
Then there's the feeling that the fight has not yet begun. That they're pushing the whole country toward civil conflict. A natural escalation of the tactics they're already employing. Destabilization isn't a symptom, it's a goal. It's the point. And this instinct I have that some of us need to be elsewhere if it gets worse.
Plus there's how annoyed I'd get, which would definitely make me less useful. I still have nerve memory of the first admin, the way they toyed with everyone's cortisol, how otherwise reasonable people were trapped in a cycle of reacting to headlines, virtue signaling, declarations of allegiance to good and opposition to bad, and the long-term result of all that hand wringing was, well, this.
Everyone knows someone who’s lost their job from all the agency cuts, everyone is worried they’re going to lose theirs in the future to general shittery. Saturdays are for protests, at least. That's to their credit.
Search: remote job organizer general strike