![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So I will probably never live outside the US. I want to stay close to my brother and sister-in-law and their kids, my BFF and her kids, my friends. He wants to stay relatively close to his family. And fundamentally, my partner does not like change, and that is just WAAAAY too much fucking change for him.
But I'm pretty much fucking sick and tired of this country right now. The allegedly Democratic president is pretty much a Rockefeller Republican - and yet millions of people here are so badly educated about their own history that they think he's a fucking socialist. I'm sure most of you have seen the clip of Republican debate audiences cheering at both the execution of 234 people by my own home state and then at leaving people without health insurance to die come across your FB or Google+ feeds. No one in DC seems to be taking seriously a jobs bill this country desperately needs, as we suffer the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Apparently all you have to be to get detained by Homeland Security is brown-skinned and on a plane. I can't even talk about the cuts to the Texas budget without sputtering in rage. Etc etc etc. The catalog of horrors is almost endless. We are displaying every single characteristic of fascist regimes. I'm tired. I'm angry. I'm scared. I'm disappointed.
This is my home. I will not give it up to these horrifying assholes without busting my butt to try to save it. This is where the war is, so this is where we fight.
But sometimes I need to fantasize about someplace I could go and just be without having to fight so hard all the goddamn time. And here's how I know I am a pragmatist at heart: I want my fantasies to make some sense. Here are my parameters:
- Fundamentally democratic socialist system of government - national health care, genuine social safety net, all that good stuff
- Fundamentally values human rights
- At least doesn't outright hate women or queers. For proxy variables, let's say that abortion and same-sex marriage, or at least civil unions, are legal and accessible.
- At least acknowledges that racism exists and that we should do stuff to try to fix that.
- Not too close to either pole, as I have seasonal affective disorder and can't go without seeing the sun in the winter
- Relatively temperate climate - preferably doesn't get below about 20 degrees F/-6 C or over 100 degrees F/38 C
- Forests and water, whether lake, river, or ocean, are nice
- Good restaurants
- Either English-speaking or the language spoken there isn't too hard for an English/Spanglish speaker to pick up (so, like, not Hungarian, Finnish, or Russian, and I've never been able to get my mouth around Portuguese pronunciation)
- Travel back to the US is relatively easy
Suggestions? Right now my only candidate is Vancouver, BC, but that whole problem where people riot and set cars on fire when they lose a sports game is distressing.
But I'm pretty much fucking sick and tired of this country right now. The allegedly Democratic president is pretty much a Rockefeller Republican - and yet millions of people here are so badly educated about their own history that they think he's a fucking socialist. I'm sure most of you have seen the clip of Republican debate audiences cheering at both the execution of 234 people by my own home state and then at leaving people without health insurance to die come across your FB or Google+ feeds. No one in DC seems to be taking seriously a jobs bill this country desperately needs, as we suffer the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Apparently all you have to be to get detained by Homeland Security is brown-skinned and on a plane. I can't even talk about the cuts to the Texas budget without sputtering in rage. Etc etc etc. The catalog of horrors is almost endless. We are displaying every single characteristic of fascist regimes. I'm tired. I'm angry. I'm scared. I'm disappointed.
This is my home. I will not give it up to these horrifying assholes without busting my butt to try to save it. This is where the war is, so this is where we fight.
But sometimes I need to fantasize about someplace I could go and just be without having to fight so hard all the goddamn time. And here's how I know I am a pragmatist at heart: I want my fantasies to make some sense. Here are my parameters:
- Fundamentally democratic socialist system of government - national health care, genuine social safety net, all that good stuff
- Fundamentally values human rights
- At least doesn't outright hate women or queers. For proxy variables, let's say that abortion and same-sex marriage, or at least civil unions, are legal and accessible.
- At least acknowledges that racism exists and that we should do stuff to try to fix that.
- Not too close to either pole, as I have seasonal affective disorder and can't go without seeing the sun in the winter
- Relatively temperate climate - preferably doesn't get below about 20 degrees F/-6 C or over 100 degrees F/38 C
- Forests and water, whether lake, river, or ocean, are nice
- Good restaurants
- Either English-speaking or the language spoken there isn't too hard for an English/Spanglish speaker to pick up (so, like, not Hungarian, Finnish, or Russian, and I've never been able to get my mouth around Portuguese pronunciation)
- Travel back to the US is relatively easy
Suggestions? Right now my only candidate is Vancouver, BC, but that whole problem where people riot and set cars on fire when they lose a sports game is distressing.
