Given the means, I would move away from the United States. It's a want I've had for a long time, stalled and quarantined by marriage, fatherhood, employment of one sort or another, and business ownership. Apart from always being a father to my son, all the rest is gone. The constraint of not having a lot of money remains.
Now, in considering such a refreshment of life, I'm confronted with knowing I'm long-in-the-tooth (originally a phrase that went with judging the age of a horse) and that any long-distance move may mean for the rest of my life, which I figure is a decade or so.
How strong my inclination to withdraw from my home country's psychopathic state of being depends — much to my chagrin — upon whether I watch or read the daily news. Since Biden's election I've been able to wean myself away somewhat from the pronouncements of human aspirations and the howls of human defeat. Unlike the attraction of evil that was Trump, the 24/7 commotion — even the jumpstart sensationalism of reporting on QAnon — now seems familiar and tread worn.
The sweep of America's jeremiads resides in a familiar political topography. Racism, sexism, anti-intellectualism, economic inequality, a mendacious and disconnected system of representative government, environmental ruination, and a ravenous war machine continues to foul the aspirational fruits of the American experiment. Yes, there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to America's problems. Even parlous climate change, increasingly experiential, seems like an outworn actuality; the world first given notice in 1992 with the Kyoto Protocol and a treaty (with the exception of the United States and China) signed in 1997.
These troubles aren't unique to America, but they are germane to every citizen that pays attention, and to the future. And they weigh on me; political tinnitus where the cures of a particular candidate are a temporary balm of a more persuasive ringing. Which leads me to quote Blaise Pascal: "All of man's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."
Yet, admittedly, I can have a quiet room now. If I move abroad would the silence be more pronounced? No. A move would bring excitement, antithetical to quiet. Still letting a different culture wash over me until I can almost be mistaken as being part of a culture I wasn't born into can be a stimulating thing. It can mean on the personal level ending the practice of ultracrepidarianism, which Americans do very well in giving "opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence." Yet I know, once an American, always an American, particularly if one is a white male. But it doesn't have to be a stain.
I was born in America, like my father but not like my mother. The circumstance of war brought them together. Because of that war patriotism clung to them like wet linen. There was no better country. No problem America could not solve. The "promise" of America was a real thing. If they were still on earth, they would recoil at the presentation of current America. Both might talk of their memories of Europe, avoiding the death and destruction, reminiscing at the romance of having traveled and survived. I think neither would object to me moving abroad.
Many people are born one place then live out their lives in another. We are a wandering species, curious, where some are ostensibly beholding to the belief that answers to our lives can be found by a change in geography. My parents surely thought so.
Others simply flee the descent of terror coming to their birthplace. Try as we may to be sanguine as we share our existence with one another and the creatures around us, wickedness is a continuum in the evolution of humankind, just ask the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Uighurs of China, indigenous tribes of the Amazon, the Druze of Syria, and those persecuted that came before them, Native Americans, African Americans — all suffering a mosaic of iniquity, destroying any notion that human savagery is somehow benign.
Recognition of the cruelty that harbors within us easily reveals itself from those we give power to. Conceding to that nature shows itself when the Rodney King quote, "Can we all get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the old people and the kids?" becomes a cliché yet a lament translatable into most any language.
Maybe it was not always so. Cro-Magnon cave drawings of 30,000 years ago do not depict the killing of other humans. Neanderthals, which scientists speculated coexisted with the Cro-Magnon for 10,000 years are not depicted on cave walls as being killed or eaten even as it is speculated their demise came at the hand of Cro-Magnon. What those humans painted are stick figures or females in repose as if to announce fertility. Such homage has researchers postulating that the Cro-Magnon were the first to develop the concept of god. If so, then warfare and division soon began to accompany human evolution as divisions in the belief of the divine formed.
Acquiescence to the ongoing ferocity of Homo sapiens can amplify the question as to why Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo heidelbergensis or so-called Heidelberg man, and Homo floresiensis, nicknames the Hobbit, failed to survive. Anthropological research begs the question more in showing that all five of these hominid species' evolutionary timelines overlap. When mammals of all sorts evolved into different species, why did Cro-Magnon become the only one left?
Somehow this question seems more important to me than will democracy survive. And maybe more important considering humankind has toyed with annihilating itself since it invented weapons of widespread desolation. That contingent remains with the more deadly threat of climate change, which when it reaches its full causatum could trigger weapons of mass destruction in the full flowering of sustained incoherence with the migration of millions and war over resources. To me, religion, commerce, useless technology, duplicitous political systems, ideological lunacy, and divorce from nature create a somnambulant flow, stroking the anti-life stirrings of our hominid heritage.
Why dwell on the negative, you may ask. Disappointment in my fellow species is how I would answer. Though I must wonder how deep the disappointment was felt in early man and woman — from a fruitless hunt or interrupted mating activity. Either could be a threat to survival. Maybe they worked through it by painting cave walls. Many millenniums later a relentless social media has the opposite effect.
Would I be less disappointed living outside of America? Well ... the food would be different, the history more maintained, the language less coarse and I could leave my phone behind. Maybe then I could feel less Cro-Magnon.
wherever you go, there you are ... it's hard enough connecting with you when we are in the same country, if you relocate to elsewhere land i would anticipate that a face to face meeting would become impossible ...
i recently reconnected with Chris Wheeler and enjoy our, however brief, opportunities to personally connect ...
it definitely is different in this 'time' of covid where close connection has become less common and, possibly, more threatening ... it's become the norm to bogart that joint my friend rather than passing it over to me ... such is the life of man, and the universe, where change is the only constant ...
whatever dreams may come, "Live long and Prosper" my friend and brother by a different mother