Exit this Roman shell

[imomus]

For those of you thinking of leaving America today -- and there are many, I'm sure -- I'd say just do it. Walk away. Leaving Britain is the best thing I ever did. I lived for years there feeling like a political and cultural exile, trying to fight back with satire and a thousand subtle forms of stubbornness and resistance. But being an 'internal exile' is not good for the soul. My struggle with attitudes which seemed toxic to me started making me as hard, cynical and corrupt as the people and the attitudes I was fighting.

Soon I realised that British people were not going to change. At least not in my short lifetime. My contribution was never going to be accepted in that country. It was much easier to get up and go. You can change the world around you by simply getting on a plane and going to the place where they think like you, even if they don't speak the same language you speak. So I went to live in France. In Germany. In Japan. I became a world citizen.

I started to think in terms of cities, and even districts of cities, rather than nations. I made my own cut and paste environment, a place where I felt comfortable and valued. I selected its elements from the internet and the parts of the cities I loved and went to live in. I count the moment I left my incorrigible homeland as the moment my adult life really began. I am now a much happier and better adjusted person.

So just leave. America doesn't deserve you. Walk away. America doesn't need your talent, your creativity and your intelligence. Or rather, it needs them desperately, but it will never acknowledge that. It's too stupid to understand that. If it calls for you, it will call for you for the wrong reasons. It will call you up as a soldier. It will call for you as canon-fodder in some spurious and unnecessary war that serves the interests of 1% of its population and an even smaller percentage of the world's population. Even if it lets you live in relative peace as a mere civilian, it will force you to live in ways that destroy the world's weather systems and its environment. It will use your tax to fund pre-emptive wars of aggressive imperialism against impoverished nations with energy resources.

Leave while you still can. Leave as a civilian, not a soldier. Leave and lead the life you were born to lead. Your absence will hurt America economically, but it deserves that. And it doesn't deserve you.

Get a passport, get a visa. Work a job, save some money. Come to Europe, come to Japan. Life is more civilised here. Come as you are, come to work, come to play, come to stay. Make love to foreigners, not Americans. Make non-American babies. Make your children world citizens, as you make yourself one.

Then you know in your brain
Leave the capitol!
Exit this roman shell!
Then you know you must leave the capitol

Leave the capitol!
Exit this roman shell!

It will not drag me down
I will leave this ten times town
I will leave this fucking dump
One room, one room

(The Fall, 'Leave The Capitol')

Comments

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

As the holder of an American passport who's lived in the UK since he was 4 years old, this whole disaster actually makes me want to move *back* to America. I tell you what, it's a horrible betrayal of one's gifts to hide out somewhere safe, making no difference, when there's places out there that really need good people fighting for them.

The problem, the threat to the world, isn't going to go away through intelligent people running away from it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If enough talented people leave the US, and if it keeps running up gigantic budget deficits by fighting wars, it will shrink to a manageable size. America is clearly on an identity quest. Let it become a red dwarf, shrunk down to its rural red states. Uninventive, intolerant, unproductive. That's its way of discovering 'who it really is'. Meanwhile, somewhere nicer, you can be discovering yours.

Why put your ingenuity at the service of 'a military monster chained to a political dwarf', as someone in the New York Review of Books puts it this month? Why generate tax revenue for a nation whose policies are not only disagreeable, but disastrous for the world, politically and ecologically?

[lazarus834.livejournal.com]

That's how I feel, which is why I left.

I can't serve a system that seeks to oppress me - otherwise I feel like I'm part of the problem. And it doesn't matter if you live in a liberal or conservative city - there are always going to be federal officers governing you, and federal taxes to pay.

I remember reading something like this in an Ayn Rand book a while ago - didn't John Galt drop out of the workforce for similar reasons?

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Surely this seems a far more likely consequence? (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/snr.html)

[theodora.livejournal.com]

Well put. I dislike like the way the leave-or-stay dialog mirrors war dialog - how one is obliged to stay in order to "show one's beliefs" or "add one's light to the sum of light." Because, please, enough metaphor. People - I, but not I alone - have come to think far too fuzzily about the relation of our actual, physical, daily lives on the individual scale to our...largely (and tellingly) metaphorical lives on the massive scale. To what imagined mass is one contributing one's ass, I ask.

Thanks for these posts.

[class-worrier.livejournal.com]

Nicely put. Liberals (for want of a better word) leaving an illiberal country can only make things worse, for those that live there and those that have to deal with them (i.e. the rest of us).

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

My family has lived here 300 years. My commitments and convictions define me: my friends, work and loved ones are all here. Furthermore, as someone committed to the Enlightenment ideals that brought this nation into being and helped to bring others to the light of democracy, I have a solemn duty to help bring this country back to its founding principles, and to take it from those who have hijacked it.

No, there are more important things than my own personal fulfillment; to leave when my country needs me most is nothing short of moral cowardice. This country may not deserve us right now, but to cut and run when faced with adversity renders us undeserving of the more just society we hope to build.

I stay and fight.

W

[leatherotter.livejournal.com]

Just a note. Seems to fly in the face of the millions of immigrants that have left their own to build a better place for themselves and their descendants. :)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

If Nazis or the Khmer Rouge were in power and dragging people out of their homes here, I would heartily agree. Right now the current 'regime' is a bunch of doughy, middle-aged hicks with little boy haircuts who took their Sunday school teachers too seriously. I won't abandon my home just because some inept, parochial twits in government are mismanaging things; I can go anywhere and find that.

W

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

PS: You are right to posit that question--I knew someone might. But what can I say? Despite the frustrations with my redder fellow citizens, I love my home, and it would kill me to see what might become of it (and indirectly, the rest of the world) should its best and brightest just leave.