“as an expat, I’ve never felt further away from where I need to be. I want to take to the streets, and shout and protest. Yet my rage from 3000 miles away makes me feel so alone.”

I feel your grief here; even so, while I’m stateside and will likely remain so, I can certainly see the appeal of leaving this soil, because this truly is becoming a dangerous stronghold of Orwellian doublethink, hypocrisy, and powermongering. (I keep thinking: New Zealand. I was an exchange student there in 1987, and remains fixed in my memory as a time of gorgeousness and unfettered idyll. Sure, that memory is warped by nostalgia, probably grossly idealized, but it is what it is.)

Think of this, though: expats serve as reality checks for ever-more brainwashed Americans. Sad to say, when the rest of the global community is painfully aware that we are being ferried off to hell in a handbasket by a horse’s ass of an illegitimately installed politician, my countrymen and women have grown too arrogant on the whole to actually hear that. But an American gone overseas, with the muliple perspectives that position necessarily engenders – that person might have a prayer of getting through to the less irrevocably brainwashed ones. (It’s kind of like when white people talk about how bad racism is. Other white people will be more inclined to listen then, than they will be when a person of color, with the actual authority of lived experience to back him or her in the rendering of such observatins. It’s a shame, but again: it is what it is.)

So: the fact that you’re speaking out, from where you are, has its own potential for impact. (You might also help those on your side of the pond to understand that those of us who remain here are not all unredeemed pieces of shit.)

Yours in struggle – V.