Just leave. Before killing yourself because you’ve come to a dead-end in America, just leave. It’s not worth contemplating suicide or slowly drinking/drugging yourself to death as you struggle to achieve the American Dream. The American Dream no longer exists. It died during the Reagan years and shows no signs of an imminent resurrection. Leave as soon as you can. Leave now.
According to YouTube, Americans are leaving in droves. And those who haven’t left yet are considering it. Now, this perception may have to do with what the YouTube algorithm feeds me based on my preferred viewing. But, still. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. I’m guessing there is a growing minority of discontent Americans who are fed up with the homeland and open to the idea of living abroad. The trend seems to be destinations like Portugal and Spain in Europe, Malaysia and Thailand in Asia. Mexico and Costa Rica closer to home also remain popular. And there are plenty of people happy to share their experiences and opinions about living outside the US (including me, although not on YouTube. Yet.), as well as how they view the US from afar.
There will be those who choose to remain in the US and say good riddance to bad rubbish. It will always be so. Patriotism comes in all shades and flavors, some pleasant, some cringe-worthy. But those who stick it out and shame those who don’t are also part of the problem. Because there might just be an interesting upside to all of these discontent Americans leaving the US. Right now, it looks like betrayal, desertion. Instead of leaving, why not stay and do something about it, the argument goes. And there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that. It’s my main regret for leaving the country of my birth. However, I left, because, while I could have stayed to fight the good fight, my children during this time would have been in public schools receiving a poor education and living in fear of a mass shooting. That wasn’t going to work.
As more Americans leave, more Americans become exposed to other cultures, other societies, different views, and different ideas. America needs more Americans who’ve seen things done elsewhere in a better way, with better results. Those who remain in America remain isolated by, among other things, the influence of the communities that surround them and the available media they consume. It happens to everybody. And in a place the size of America, it happens fast. It becomes easy to believe things just are they way they are and couldn’t possibly be better anywhere else. Because this is America, after all. It’s always been the best country in the world. Nothing can change that.
Unfortunately, it did change.
In the last few decades, America has become nothing more than a marketplace of human effort. It is a relentless cycle of hard labor and rampant consumerism. That is not to say that Americans haven’t always worked hard or liked to buy nice things. What I mean is that our society has deteriorated to the point where the economic marketplace towers above everything else. The rat wheel (a rather bleak metaphor) dominates the cage.
This is the legacy of the failed counterculture movement of the 1960s, which was replaced, prophetically, by the forgettable Me generation (the New Age and macrame) of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan arrived in 1980 at an auspicious time, stepping into the confusing vortex of hippie ideals and individual greed, with the answer everyone wanted to hear. Less government. Equals more opportunity. Equals more wealth for everyone. Because as the rich got richer, the poor would get … well, less poor. Reaganomics would cure all the ills of our flailing society.
Less government, instead of better government, quickly became the mantra of progress. But progress proved to chiefly benefit the wealthiest, as subsequent decades have revealed. For the most part, society regressed. Less government – or to be more precise, the entrenched “more government/less government” debate – has become the primary cause of our current malaise, our social anxieties, our discontent. As a result, government has failed American society by allowing homelessness to explode, crime to remain unchecked, wages to stagnate for generations, education quality to decline, racism to proliferate, and healthcare to become effectively unavailable to many. This complete and utter failure on the part of our elected representatives foments populism and extremism. The longer meaningful change for the betterment of everyone is delayed by our ignorance and unwillingness to address these daunting issues, the faster extremism will expand and embed itself further as a “legitimate” alternative to democratic ideals.
That was not a tangential rant. Exposure to other societies and different ideas by spending meaningful time abroad brings a more informed perspective to what happens at home. It doesn’t mean that brain-washed Americans come home intent on converting America to some socialist commune. What it means is that Americans might come home with experiences that influence their thinking and approach to solving America’s problems, that the conditions they lived in outside the US could inform how we redesign the things that aren’t working at home.
This way of looking at emigration changes the calculus. It is no longer about fleeing your country of birth, giving the homeland up for lost. It is about growing as a person by experiencing new places, new cultures and learning from them; it is about growing as an American by applying what you learn as a citizen in your community, even if it is only with your vote. It is about becoming a better human.