I don’t have a strong back. I’m asthmatic and have two bad knees. Most physical labor is out for me.
My father was a truck driver, BTW, and it takes a lot of training to become a truck driver (as well as a relatively clean driving record, which I do not have), and when you start out as a truck driver, it’s not going to be at 40K a year.
My dad didn’t stay in Brazil after he retired because of some kind of churlish resentment tat “his boy” didn’t win. He did it because he had an up close and personal view of the Bush administration. He worked in the Department under every President since Reagan. He never particularly had a partisan view of the administrations he worked for. He liked some Republican mucky mucks and didn’t like some Dem ones (my father has been a registered independent all his adult life, by the way). I know, for instance, that he escorted the first George Bush on a vist once when he was still VP, and said he was a very decent, intelligent and competent guy. My dad did not much like Madeleine Albright, who he described as “hell on a vist.”
The thing is, until GWB, administrations let career people do their jobs and did not politicize the Department beyond the appointment of the Secretary. Under Bush, people who had been there forever, knew what they were doing and and had no partisan axe to grind were sudeenly being pressured to toe the White House line. Honest advice was no longer sought. Basic information and warnings that did not comport with the neo-con vision of Middle Eastern conquest were seen as “disloyal.” Long time career guys started resigning. One of those guys, Richard Clarke, was a guy my dad once worked under and knew and respected as an honest, patriotic, career service guy who ended up getting publicly slimed by the Bush administration for testifying before the 9/11 commission that the White House had ignored warnings about bin-Laden before 9/11 because they were obsessed with the idea of invading Iraq, and thatafter 9/11 they had pressured him to basically lie and manufacture “evidence” that Iraq was connected to 9/11.
These were not “liberals” or anti-American assholes that the White House was fucking with. They were non-political career service guys, who were having their careers threatened for trying to do their jobs honestly.
It was also well-known within the Department that there was a rift between Colin Powell and the White House and that Powell was not happy about having put his reputation on the line in his UN presentation, only to find out that all his misgivings going in were well-placed and that the white House had hung him out to dry by knowingly giving him bogus information.
The White House became mistrustful of the Department as a whole. round the time the WH started monitoring personal emails and comminications between State Department employees for anything critical of Bush (something no other Potus had done)
was when my dad started saying he would retire and stay in Rio if Bush got reelected. A lot of really good, long time Department guys started retiring or resigning at the time.
My dad ended up staying in for another year or two after the '04 election (at the request of a Department that was hemmorhaging career guys). I asked him what he thought of Rice as SOS, and he said “all they care about is how she looks on televison.” he said her visits were basically just staged photo ops, with no real diplomacy going on. I don’t think he saw Rice herself as incompetent necessarily, just that the White House wasn’t asking her to do much.
So he retired, and stayed in Rio, and he’s still there. He visits the US once or twice a year, and has not ruled out returning permanently if the Republicans ever get out of power.
My dad used to be a really idealistic, patriotic, pro-service kind of guy. He went through ROTC in College during Vietnam and then straight into flight school in the Air Force, and he stayed in the Air Force for 20 years. My dad was they guy with the crew cut who wouldn’t smoke pot at parties. Ths was during the 60’s, in California. He was, and is, as straight an arrow as you’re going to find. As a father in those years, he was like Duvall in The Great Santini (he’s mellowed out since then). His decision to stay in Brazil wasn’t a simplistic partisan thing, but a real disenchantment with a particular administration (not a party), which had changed things institutionally for those in government service.
I haven’t even gone into any real detail, but my dad has a cataog of grievances against the Bush adminstration from an inside perspective which caused him to want to take this extended vacation.
It’s not necessarily unpatriotic if you believe the country has fundamentally abandoned the principles which merited patriotic sentiment in the first place. I’m speaking theoretically only. I do not believe the US had done that yet.
This is the attitude of a stooge. Big corporations, federal government and cultural extremists are handing us all a big shit sandwich, and rather than protest the sandwich you denounce anyone else who isn’t taking a bite.
If anyone is so sensitive that McCain (or Bush) would cause them to consider leaving the country then their world outlook should be such that they’re also horrified at the entire system. Therefore, by that point, it shouldn’t even matter who’s president, which party is in control, who’s Miss America, etc.
Still, it’s safer in the inside than on the outside.
Be sure they’ve also got a major political party that expects to create a power base by catering to the immigrants and expects to divert attention from the massive problems created by uncontrolled immigration with gratuitous accusations of racism and a lot of happytalk about how wonderful diversity is.
If by all of this, you mean we’ve got a major political party which scapegoats immigrants as a cynical method of distraction from the massive problems caused by the current administration’s economic incontinence by directly playing to inherent racism and xenophobia of its largely provincial and uneducated voting base, I agree with you.
I don’t quite understand all the outrage . . .
Would the patriotic thing to do be stay and work for the ACLU or something? What do you all think is the proper response to a political religious climate that’s antithetical to your beliefs and a gradual dissolution of what you love about your country?
How is leaving such an overreaction, particularly when you feel like your government is beholden to an interest group who represents the polar opposite of your values? Let’s say you lived in England, and decided to leave because you can’t stand rainy weather (I know England isn’t always rainy; this is a hypothetical) so you move to, say, Arizona. Is that so ridiculous? Now how much more important is a political climate you feel is reflective of your values than weather?
Gestalt
Good grief. Well, my thoughts on this is that if you really want to leave if Obama (ETA: I meant loses) then you should. You should not stay in a country where you are unhappy with both the government and your society…especially if you actually have the choice to leave. As several posters have mentioned, they have left the US and are happy where they are now.
That said, I think that leaving simply because your candidate (ETA: loses again…sheesh, I shouldn’t type on my phone) is both stupid and short sighted. It’s a childish response. And adult response is to buckle down and try and win next time. To devote yourself to attempting to change your fellow citizens attitudes, expectations, perceptions. As someone pointed out up thread, McCain winning doesn’t demonstrate that the RR is gaining ground in the US. What it would (theoretically) demonstrate is that more people identify with McCain’s proposals for the direction we should go than Obama. That Palin is popular I think has less to do with her psudo-religious stances than the fact that, contrary to the believes of many members of the SD, she has a personality and charisma that appeals to people. Sort of like, you know, Obama…who’s personal politics I ALSO don’t think line up perfectly with the majority of American’s, but who is still wildly popular (even with the OP who admits he doesn’t agree with all of Obama’s stances…right there that should tell you something about how some feel about Palin).
Even if the US was picking up momentum toward some right wing stance (I think we are moving in the opposite direction personally, whether McCain wins or not), the adult thing to do is to fight…not run away. If McCain DOES win, and if we DO shift to a right wing stance then you are still talking about the majority of American’s being somewhere in the middle after all. Like the left wing nutters, the rabid right only makes up a small percentage of the total population. If a McCain presidency is going to be the disaster predicted by some of the gloom and doomers, then you guys will have another shot at booting him out in the next election…and will have an even better shot at getting more of your guys into the Legislative branch fairly soon…which should pretty nicely hang the government and give you the time needed to work on more of that ‘change’ stuff.
Suit yourself though…if you want to go, and if you have the chance to do so then you should do what is best for yourself I suppose. My sister and her family has already done this. They moved to Ireland earlier this year. They love it there…though they are finding out that the grass always looks greener when you look over the fence. While SOME things are better there, many are worse or simply different. You (the OP) will find that out for yourself if you follow through. I wish you luck though which ever way you jump.
-XT
I’ll assume you don’t need me to link to the thread where you announced that I had reported a post. So clearly the dishonest posturing isn’t coming from me.
Insofar as they are both (allegedly) expatriates, which is the subject under discussion? Obviously.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, exactly.
It’s been happening for a while now and the trend has only picked-up tremedously in the past eight years. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently “unpatriotic” about leaving a nation whose ideals run counter to yours. This is not a first nor would it be a last – after the Spanish civil war there was massive migration on the part of the Republicans (and others) who simply didn’t want to live under a dictatorship.
Now, has the US become a dictatorship? Well, no, not officially anyway. But it is sure trending that way – you only need go through customs in order to feel the oppression. And if McCain is elected alog with his fundie VP, odds are good to great that said Police State feel will only increase. Sad to see how the light is fading on what was once the most admirable and free society in the Western World.
Anyway, here’s a long list of current and future expats expressing those feelings and more:
A Growing Trend of Leaving America
Three million a year is not small change and if you read their comments you’ll also notice that the subheading of the article is incorrect. For most of then are leaving due to the current political climate in the United States.
Can’t say that I blame them.
So in order to patriotic I should quit my job and train in an entirely different field and then seek employment in that field?
Gestalt
Well, I don’t see one. What I see is one party that wants cheap labor and another party that wants votes, and no party at all that cares what happens to people like me if we try to assimilate more than a hundred million immigrants in less than four decades.
This is not the point – not to me, at least. It’s not that I think McCain will run the country into the ground. Heck, he’d be close to having my vote if Obama wasn’t in the race and if he wasn’t running his campaign the way he was. I think McCain has been pandering for two years to get into the White House; the question is, of course, whether he’s going to keep pandering once he’s there or whether he’s been doing all of this to turn around and clean house. He would have a one term presidency, probably, but he would be an American hero.
To me, the point is this: if the country I live in decides it would rather have disgusting attack politics, fiscal irresponsibility to the point of wastefulness while barely even giving lip service to small government, pandering to the Religious Right, and four more years of the same party that’s thrown us over the barrel for the last eight, it is not the country I grew up in. It’s not the place I am in love with. I don’t know if it can be salvaged and I don’t know of an effective way to fix it or even work for change. I can vote, but does my vote really matter? I can campaign and donate, but I think the Democrats are by and large just as foolish and wrongheaded as their opponents and there is minimal likelihood of a better party gaining acceptance anytime soon.
I’m not afraid of McCain. I decided a long time ago that I can live with McCain, and I think he’d ignore the religious right after he got elected. What scares me is that he’ll die and leave Palin in charge.
By the way, I have heard from righties IRL that they’re hoping for exactly that. They think it’s God’s plan for McCain to die and leave Palin in charge. I hope that sentiment is not ubiquitous in the religious right, but I know better than not to assume it.
Go ahead. Link to it so that the others can see that I merely asked rhetorically whether you had reported a post in a different forum about which you were crying piteously and you replied with a specific post you had reported in this Forum.
I do not point out who has reported a post, but I feel no need to maintain a confidentiality broken by the poster who made it.
I’ll miss them. If we get a president Palin, say because McCain’s diapers don’t get changed for a couple of days and he goes septic, and that president Palin gets to place two similarly moronic SCOTUS justices, this country could quickly become a festering hellhole.
Consider, if the ignorant weenies currently pulling the Republican party around by the naughty-hairs get what they want the kind of country they will build:
No abortion.
No birth control that prevents implantation.
No birth control at all if the pharmacist feels wiggy about it.
No sex education at all in school.
No barrier to teaching creationism directly next to evolution.
Ten commandments on every wall in every courthouse.
Government money channeled to religious schools, and general church programs.
No protection for gays, not only can’t they marry, they just might go back to being arrested.
And that’s just off the top of my head with a minute of thinking. People want to leave because they feel like the above is coming closer and accelerating. And whether it’s realistic or not, the fear that the American experiment will end drowning in Christian ignorance and dogma is very real.
But working class whites have nothing to fear from a candidate who associates with a Weather Underground radical who bombed the Pentagon and says he wishes he’d planted a lot more, attended a church headed by an Afro-Nazi for twenty years, and described us as clinging bitterly to our guns and religion. Yeah, that really makes me feel like I can trust the man.
Red…you keep trotting this cite out as if it’s meaningful or something. Immigration TO the US (legal immigration, mind) is still increasing every year. ILLEGAL immigration is ALSO increasing yearly. Even if I accept your cite there (of 3 million a year of US citizens giving up their citizenship to live somewhere else), and even if those people commenting there are a representative sample (which I doubt), it’s not like our population is draining away or something. Unlike Spain we actually have a positive population growth without immigration…WITH it we are still net gainers population wise.
If folks want to bolt and run, well…more power to em. I won’t say it will break my heart if they leave because we don’t need those kinds of folks who will cut and run because their candidate loses…we need CITIZENS who are willing to stick it out and understand it’s not all roses. I say the same thing to the right wing nut jobs who may be considering running off to some other country if Obama wins…don’t let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out. We don’t need cowards or babies…we need people who are willing to step up and speak their minds, even if it’s unpopular, and effect a change. And one’s who are smart enough to realize that the pendulum of American politics swings first one way…but it ALWAYS manages to swing back again, even if it doesn’t do so in a time frame one may wish.
-XT