A Gallup poll is saying 40% of young women want to leave. I feel I’ve somehow failed the upcoming generation. We are going backwards in so many ways. For one thing being told you have no say about your own body must be terrifying. How did we go from a place people want to come to, to a place people want to leave?
Trump.
Franklin
make 20
A Euro-based outsider view: I heard lots of moaning and expressing a desire to leave from US-based friends during the reign of Bush jr, so I think you can throw in him as well. But admittedly, the Bush II and III periods were more annoyances than outright horror shows. The (D) interregnum periods of Obama and Biden certainly improved the view on the US, although the D nomination of the near fossilized Biden made a lot of people raise questions about what the heck was going on over there.
I think that a way to understand what was / is going on over here without getting bogged down in the specific inanities of US politics is that it is a natural, FAFO progression, which I will describe with relative generic labels “liberals” and conservatives" although obviously those words from an international perspective really mean “conservatives” and “far-right nut jobs”.
It’s true that, relatively speaking, Biden’s presidency looks like Shangri-La compared to … whatever THIS is. But it was also devoid of anything remotely describable as bold or principled, or any sort of courageous movement outside of whatever the leadeship saw as sufficient “political cover”. It was just, so far as Christards are concerned, more accommodating degenerate gay and trans and brown people with funny accents and depraved practices. It was the promotion of Godless science, the continued seduction and corruption of their children away from their rigid ideology, the continued marginalization of their own beliefs which to them are self-evidently the very salvation of mankind. The acceleration of the world moving on … from THEM.
And they weren’t wrong. It’s just that if some improved prosperity and stability and hope had trickled down to them from it, they might have let it pass enough that an organized and rabid movement wouldn’t have coalesced around it and their opposition wouldn’t have “landed” with enough people to sustain and grow it.
After all, it’s not like Europe and Scandanavia and NZ / AU lack their own far right nutters. But they long ago embraced things like guaranteed higher education and healthcare and retirement and people don’t want to take on the anxious burdens we Americans have, and so they are less open to some crazy experiment where the very principles and practices that make their social safety nets possible would have to be abandoned in the name of some questionable ideological or racial “purity”.
Or that’s my clumsy attempt at an analysis anyway.
It’s likely happened during every administration. Folks don’t like the policies so they threaten to, or actually do, leave. However, there are no actual percentages of emigration from the U.S., only rough estimates so it’s hard to tell.
Heck, there were folks who left when Obama was elected because they didn’t want to live in a place where white men weren’t in charge.
To be wholly honest, I want to leave America. But I also feel me mom may not survive such a move. Her friends and few remaining family are here in America. I may have been born in America, but I no longer claim to be an American. I go with me ancestry. I am a 90% Highlander (paid for one of those extensive DNA test things) that just happened to have been born in America. Now, even if I do leave America, I am fairly certain there ain’t no other country on this planet who would allow me to expat. And, could I afford it?
Another rant about that t-Rump.
Franklin
P.S. - Maybe I can do a reverse Mexican Border Sneaky?
