If you go, you need to have a place that is willing to take you. Trying to do a Road Warrior run someplace with genetic mutant MAGAs on your tail to a border that may not take you isn’t a safe bet.
(Actually, isn’t that how the series ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ starts? )
That said, the one thing I’ve learned about bunker mentality from the yokels on ‘The Outdoors Channel’ is that once you’ve treed a bear, it’s easy to < yuck > < yuck > < yuck > take potshots at it until it drops out of the tree dead.
“Wah look, Jethro! Weren’t that Excitin’? That’s yer 2A right, boy. Now lift up that man’s skull and let’s take a picture. < filters through his wallet > Wah, he’s a member of the AICPA! That’s an eight pointer! < yuck > < yuck > < yuck > Aren’t you Proud?”
Yes, I was living in Cairo, Egypt way back around 2002 when I first started dipping my toe into on-line activities. “CairoCarol” was my moniker for an on-line word game I was playing at the time, so when I signed up for the Dope I used the same username.
I haven’t really planned for my exodus, but I’ve been academically mulling it over. I have an old friend who lives in New Zealand who has offered me their spare bedroom.
I have a background in medicine, having spent 8 years as an EMT before a back injury forced me to give that up. I’m sure I could find something tangential to that if I were to leave the country. My fiancée similarly has a medical background.
I don’t necessarily want to leave, however.
I liken the conversation about emigrating to the movie Office Space, where one of the characters is named Michael Bolton, and someone suggests that he just go by “Mike” if he’s tired of people commenting about his name and the famous singer:
“No way. Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”
Apologies for the double-post. I thought I was doing an edit, but somehow it posted twice.
I have a friend that was able to get a dual Luxembourg citizenship, because he had an ancestor that lived in Luxembourg around 1900 or something. He found out about that, and then jumped through whatever hoops they had. He still lives in the US, but visits Luxembourg periodically and has citizenship there as well.
If Trump were ten years younger I’d question the likelihood of a 2028 election. 2020 was rigged and stolen and everyone knows it and great people like FDR and Putin have had more than two terms. Dunno if the fates will allow (yet SCOTUS will) and fortunately Vance has zero charisma and there’s nobody evident (not botn in South Africa - and all we need is an amendment paid for…) who could take over or run successfully. Sadly, the Dems don’t really have a front-runner either so anarchy it is.
And you’re not worried that an uncharismatic young man an octogenarian’s heartbeat away from the presidency might see the need to skip such inconvenience?
Imagine if our Dear Leader should pass away from natural causes a few months before the 2028 election. Elections might be pushed back a few weeks, meaning that all those pesky vote-by-mail types would have to fight with Christmas post in the newly gutted postal system.
I think it’s easier to disenfranchise and gerrymander than to rig or suspend elections, myself, but I wouldn’t write off Vance so easily.
God, you’re a piece of shit. Sorry the collapse of the US is boring for you.
We’ve started the immigration process, but I don’t think we were fast enough. Elon Musk eliminated my wife’s job and our healthcare, so we are scrambling to put our house on the market and downsize quickly. We were planning on building a home in another country starting this year but now I’m not sure, we might have to scramble.
Sigh, yeah Weirmar or Quisling Vance, take your pick. Trump has the most shadowy inept cabinet I can think of, so someone besides Musk is writing Executive Orders.
I will therefore not write off Vance and enough steroids might keep Trump going anyways. I don’t know who is really “running” the USA (Musk is doing some bit of it, sure) yet what worries me is I don’t see any significant opposition.
Hegseth said today “no return for Ukraine to pre-2014 borders”. That is huge. Now do 11 years of sanctions peel back? Can Russia return to the G8?
Or return to the G7? Dunno how to phrase this yet clearly all is forgiven and those sanctions were bad. And I still cannot believe Stermer is still going to visit Trump (before or after Putin in Saudi)
Seeing this with great frequency. So many social media posts whining and complaining, all with “somebody do something …” So much online line (in and out of social media) on what individuals and groups can do …
Honestly I don’t know. I’d like to think that if/when Constitutional order has irrecoverably failed, I could huff off in protest and say “this is not MY America”.
But that would mean going someplace that’s better than America. That’s no small ask even in the normal international status quo, and the international status quo is about to get a lot more unstable. For example I have ties to Japan, but if the US economy collapses, and China or North Korea decide to get spicy, then is Japan really that much better? (Insert your own country of choice).
Then I have to ask, how much power does the federal government have over my day-to-day? I’m sure the functioning of federal institution affects me in myriad ways that aren’t visible to me, so I don’t want to dismiss that, but the fact is that I live in a red state that keeps to its own affairs (relatively speaking). Important things like civil rights are likely to deteriorate without oversight, but again, can I find someplace that will definitely be better? There’s probably an answer, but I probably don’t have that answer. Pacific rim? Threats from China and NK. Europe? Maybe headed for another continental war. That’s setting aside the whole thing of whether I can even be accepted as an immigrant at my age, I know that would be hard for Canada (plus the fact that relations aren’t great right now).
I’ve always wanted to emigrate, never more than now, but I simply see no way to answer the question of where I’d go. It seems like if things get really bad in the US, everywhere else is also likely to change in unpredictable and probably bad ways.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “When America Sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.” supposedly originating in the 1929 Wall Street Crash. I haven’t lived in the USA in over 10 years yet the US Constitution is all the world has got. I’ve seen both the original document and a piece of the Magna Carta (it’s all in pieces anyways) yet the basic themes of liberty vs. totalitarianism is in both: “Law is superior to the King”
Think globally, act locally is a good piece of wisdom or counsel, and to follow that principle may sound like grassroots stuff yet at best 6 of 10 citizens who are eligible vote every four years and much less in the intervening years in the US. Less than 50% have a passport.
Good that you have ties to Japan and presumably speak enough of the language. If and when Taiwan is re-occupied there won’t be a shot fired (at least not by the US Navy). China is just building an economic empire, not the occupy half the world kind. And Best Korea just likes to see how far over Japan they can fire missiles and they’re a vassal of China.
Stay and fight for your rights. “Law is superior to the King” yet keep your powder dry regarding Japan. Yet if the fit hits the shan, it will still be “interesting times” as some fortune cookie author wrote.
Yeah, shorter version of my post is that the whole world is so interdependent on America that I think things will get bad everywhere if they get bad in America. Maybe not in the exact same way, maybe it’s economic or security or human rights norms or something else. But degrading any one of those elements usually means degradation of others, and America is directly (or indirectly) a load-bearing member of these elements for many counries. Trump is now busily hacking away at that support.
I do not at all care of the state of affairs, I wish it were possible for America to decline without accelerating the decline of the rest of the world order. Certainly America has gotten things wrong, and it would be nice to think we’re going to find out how wonderful things will be without the American empire mucking things up, but there are just too many bad actors waiting to fill the gap.
I think for me that the difference is, if things are bad everywhere because they’re bad in America, the rest of the world can buckle down and ride the storm, while Americans are going to be at the centre of the damage.
If things are bad in America because there’s a global trend of right-wing populist authoritarianism, at least outside of America there are fewer guns and more healthcare, so a slightly better quality of life while suffering.
I’m not sure there’d still be a system of private insurance companies still running business as usual and powerful in the US like there is now in such a case. So I think things there would be more equal(ly bad) compared to the rest of the world.
We need to start fighting like the abolitionists fought. Refusing to follow the law, when picked for a jury prosecuting someone for opposing an evil system, refusing to convict and voting not guilty on the jury.
People really underestimate how powerful jury nullification can be to opposing an evil system.
I think that the Luigi Mangione case scares the Hell out of the higher ups in this administration. I hope the people on that jury free him. I hope that people will stay and fight that way. In all honesty, I Can’t leave: I have no skills to earn income elsewhere and I am older so any other country would see me as nothing but a financial drain.
That, and I have kids… so I have skin in the game.
I’m too old, post-cancer, don’t have much money or resources, and no jaw-dropping skills to get me across the border anywhere. Nobody wants me. No relatives able to give me a dual citizenship. Visit? Sure - everyone likes money from tourists and Americans are still permitted to travel most places (for now). Live there? Not so much.
I’m staying in the US whether or not I want to because I don’t have a choice.
So… I may be forced to fight. I don’t know. We live in uncertain times.
Some of us have places we can go, languages we speak. But there are also complicated issues to watch out for. For instance, Trump may decide not to send you the social security that we might still be sending out, to foreign countries. You would need to keep an apartment here for an address, and even spend at least half a year here every year. Trump would not be the only president doing that. In times of austerity some presidents have done that.
This. I’m Canadian and I’m worried (51st state and all that) as everything in the US is completely unpredictable now. Stuff that’s happening now (eg Elon and his tech bros “auditing” the US govt) would have only been imaginable in some unbelievable SF novel 10 years ago. So I’m afraid that anything goes.
Europe as an escape? Then what happens if Trump pulls out of NATO (either formally or through inaction) and sells Ukraine down the river?
New Zealand or Australia? What happens if the China/Taiwan balloon goes up and that part of the world goes violent?