The "Should I Stay or Should I Go" debate re. emigrating from the U.S. seems to be in full swing today due to
LL's announcement that he will be moving to Vancouver.
Many of my close friends in the U.S. are not U.S. nationals and when I think of them it's with a low-grade anxiety, a nagging fear and a sense of threat, as though a door were slowly, almost imperceptibly, closing on them. Increasingly I feel that same worry and concern for my friends who are U.S. nationals. So I am
glad that LL is leaving.
I think that the presumption of some that those who leave are giving up, abdicating their responsibilities, abandoning their brethren, or turning their backs on political activism, is deeply mistaken. I think that presumption weakens our ability to resist the Bush regime by blinding us to the fact that all politics - even the most local of politics - is ultimately global in its implications.
With apologies to
The The, we live in a world where `all the planet's little wars are joining hands.' Well, so are all the world's little struggles for human rights. I don't think it matters where you push back against what is happening in the U.S. and what the present Bush regime is doing to the world, so long as you
push hard. It doesn't matter to me whether you want to fight primarily on the terrain of anti-war activism, or on electoral reform, or on combating homophobia and heterosexism, or on opposing sexism or racism or any of a number of human rights issues,
so long as you do so in a way that recognises that all these struggles are linked. And the geographic region of the planet that you choose to live while you're pushing back doesn't matter to me either. Although it
does matter to me that you should get to choose where to live, because one of the ways that I choose to push back is by promoting freedom of movement. But that's another diary.
While it is true that only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections, they don't have to be in the U.S. to do so. And they don't have to be in the U.S. to participate in struggles for human rights and freedoms because those struggles are global, not national. Say it three times fast - the struggle to get rid of Bushco and his supporters is international not national. Even within U.S. borders. Maybe you can't tell just by looking around you, but I'll guarantee that the next time you're out on a big protest march some of the people you're marching side by side with will be foreigners.
Let me tell you a story.
Shortly before I left the United States, I was talking with an old friend from a sophisticated, vibrant, thriving, lively metropolis - one of the greatest cities of the world. I'm from a small, provincial, little city on a small sparsely populated island. Both have their beauties, both have their uglinesses. But if we'd stayed put and not ventured into the wider world, we'd never have become friends.
We're both long-time foreigners and activists with U.S. spouses and we were talking about why he has decided to stay and why I was leaving (or rather why I was glad to be leaving, since leaving had more to do with immigration hassles than choice per se).
He quoted John Lennon, "If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire . . ."
And I thought about that for a bit, since neither of us are huge fans of empire. And several years earlier that John Lennon quotation had been a small part of why I had moved to `Rome.'
I replied, "Give me a lever long enough and a firm place to stand" or words to that effect.
And our conversation drifted on to other topics.
Perhaps because we'd both been foreigners for a long time and because we'd been through some rough fights together, there wasn't any talk of betrayal, or abdicating political responsibility, abandonment, or complicity. He didn't accuse me of giving up the fight. I didn't accuse him of propping up a military empire through his taxes.
I know I can count on him to be pushing hard in his corner of the world, and I'm pretty damn sure he knows he can be counting on me to be doing the same in mine, wherever that may be at any moment.
Being a habitual foreigner is costly - I don't think it's the easy option some people think it is. You end up missing a lot of people and being homesick for a lot of different places. I still see ghosts all the time - my good right eye tricks me into thinking I see old friends in places where I only have new friends. It's easy to be lonely. Everywhere is home and nowhere is home. Everything is transient and temporary. And you never quite fit in, you never simply `belong.' Not even when you go back to the places you first came from. Always, you must answer questions about `where are you from?' - questions to which there are no longer any simple answers.
But the costs are also the prize. And the prize is that the old national allegiances don't fit any more. Because you have friends and allies strung out across the world like pearls, and your loyalties are to them and to the ideals that you share with them and these are the property and product of no single nation. And through them your loyalties are to the world - and not just to the little patch of dust and earth where you happened by pure chance to be born.
