I lived in Italy until Silvio Berlusconi came to power. My wife is Italian and I love Italy and really loved living there. I strongly disagree with SB and his policies, so I have left Italy permanently (although I still own an apartment there). I now live and work in Dublin, Ireland.
I will return to Italy the day that SB gets the boot.
Achilles, if you really love Italy, wouldn’t it be better to stay and help get rid of him? As for the ‘love it or leave it’ admonition, why does it always seem to come from the right? Presumably the neo-cons didn’t love America as it was before their crackdown on civil rights, their transfer of power to big business and the blurring of the separation of Church and State else they wouldn’t have made those changes. When they complained of welfare queens, insufficient powers for the security services and the absence of God in public policy, why wasn’t opposition framed as ‘love it or leave it’?
It seems redneck elements of the right expect self-imposed exile of their opponents but even the equivalent moronic counterparts on the left refrain from suggesting that course of action. Is it because cosmopolitan, internationalist liberals generally don’t want to foist their garbage on the rest of the world?
Yeah, probably but that’s the hard way. I took the “love it or leave it” route. The easy way out.
Judging from what’s going on in Switzerland, things in Europe are gonna get worse before they get better…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3306141.stm
:mad:
Perhaps they prefer to spout hyperbole… Not being one, I couldn’t say for sure. Of course, it’s the hyperbole that’s likely to provoke the “love it or leave it” response… I think that may explain your left/right difference.
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I don’t mean to imply that there’s no hyperbole on the right, but it’s often of a different flavor: “My taxes are so high, I’ll have to work nine jobs to pay them!” just doesn’t seem to provoke a “Why don’t you move to Elbonia, then?” kind of response. But the “We have no civil liberties!” kind of complaint often elicits irritation. Both are exaggerations, but the second would seem to be unreasonable to many more than the first, IMO. Thus, the thought that the complainer might see things differently if exposed to a place where they truly have no civil rights comes easily.
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And maybe it’s just that conservatism is more or less about keeping things the way they are (or were), and liberalism is about changing things. “Love the way I want it, or leave it!” Hmmmm… Not the same sense, really.
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And no, I’m not picking on you, just trying to answer your (presumably not rhetorical) question. We seem to agree at least in that I think it makes more sense to stick around and try to fix problems than to go away and sulk.
one thought that comes to mind is don’t wars happen over politics? the army did’nt stay here for to fight the gulf war.
One of my brothers left the US for Canada during the Viet Nam war, because he thought the US was turning too anti-free-speech and he wanted to publish his opinions.