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

[(Anonymous)]

It's naive to think that people can just up and leave. What's most important for most people is not whether their govt is mildly right-wing or very right-wing (as the choice was in the US) but their network of family, friends, social structures/relations etc., which even in this day and age tend to be overwhelmingly geographically based. Despite your praise for the tightly strutured social models in Japan, Nick, you yourself are something of an "electron libre" as the French say, and are probably more suited to a wandering, ad hoc modus operandi. There are some things to be gained from the "cut & paste" lifestyle, but also a certain depth that is lost. You live in Berlin, and you like the social democratic model of German govt, and yet you're really only floating on the surface of the social polis there. You spend a good part of your time on the Net where you converse with mainly Anglo-Saxon people and read the Anglo-Saxon media, your friends and acquaintances mostly aren't German or Berliners, you haven't bothered to learn the language so there are crucial ways in which you can't participate in the life of the city, you're not really much interested in the German culture of today, and when you do go out wandering, you search out familiarity in the same hipster/ethnic areas you'd go to in any city in the world... in short, you're not really living in Berlin, because you could be in any number of big cities, including American ones, leading exactly the same sort of life. If all this sounds like a criticism, it isn't really because it fits my own profile pretty well too. But it's a lifestyle that is not suited to everyone, and is, as I said above, one with its losses as well as its gains.