International realtors report a highly profitable increase in Americans searching to move abroad. European countries like Italy and Spain as well as Latin American nations as close as Mexico are the top look-sees. Also, Great Britain is a popular locale of interest.
It’s funny, I thought reading these articles, because … well … mmm … (I’ve been thinking the same thing). Seriously. I could hardly stand the Trump regime with one after another upsetting cruel decision and all four years just plumb crazy.
And … closer to home, I’ve heard other people, folks I actually know, say right out loud their desire to retire overseas. They’ve “had it,” they all said. Americans nearing or at retirement age who’ve lived all their lives in this wonderful nation of free speech, press and religion and never a king or dictator yet, perceive the U.S. already changed to its detriment, dysfunction and disrepair. This country is not the country we grew up in, my contemporaries voice separately yet collectively. What’s more, these friends and associates claim no political ideology for leaving the nation of our birth. They are indeed Republicans and Democrats, even Independents, and just plumb tired of what’s already happened to our great nation.
Furthermore, one news article cited the number one reason so many Americans are calling up international realtors in search of leaving the USA: guns.
That’s MY reason, too!!
How ’bout that?
See, I believe in gun control, like most citizens residing in modern progressive 21st century countries. But here, I’m surrounded by Americans who are defiant, stubborn, and unwilling to even discuss the issue. The phrase ‘gun control’ caused so much volatile counter remarks and outright threats in political debates, between Democrats and Republicans, that liberals just stopped using the phrase altogether.
But when The Who’s Roger Daltrey, of all people, kindly suggests our nation has a big problem with guns that other people of the world cannot fathom, given our great and mighty and prosperous world-leading nation, perhaps gun control should be Conversation Number One in political debates. Let the Republicans take up for guns and more guns while Democrats maintain that’s just plumb crazy to let everybody have powerful guns no questions asked and no mandated license and instruction on gun safety and firearm respect. Like how we now live and many die—tens of thousands … every year.
Everybody don’t need a gun
Police chiefs and law enforcement officers sure would like to turn back the clock to the years when our nation at least attempted to maintain some semblance of gun control—instead of none today.
There are reasons why Americans will fight to the death to keep their firearms, including military-style assault rifles used each week in our national nauseatingly tally of mass shootings:
One: movies and TV shows featuring the need for overwhelming firepower—whereby we learned long ago that what the brain sees, it thinks is real. We’re the nation whose citizens have grown numb to mass shootings, even of kindergarteners and babies. We take in the visuals of the latest mass shootings with glazed eyes, like we’re watching an old black-and-white TV rerun of The Rifleman.
Two: shooter video games—whereby we learned after the mass shooting at Columbine High late last century that kids’ brains on violent computer games, where each animated human body that’s shot bleeds red blood, causes an emotional disconnect with the reality of cold-blooded murder.
Three: lax parental control—whereby we learned a few decades ago that kids cannot be left to play violent video games for hours on end without restrictions by the adults guiding their young lives.
Four: elected leaders taken in by the National Rifle Association—whereby we learned long ago that money talks and congressional leaders were bought big time by the NRA which didn’t give a rat’s ass about the growing mass shootings by AK-47 style machine-like guns, once banned in the 1990s but never again—while the dead bodies stack up and the number of citizen survivors of gunshot wounds outnumber many U.S. city populations.
Five: heil whoever—whereby we learned that half the country prefers a (white) strongman leader who clutches the Bible in one hand (even if upside down) and a high-powered military-style rifle in the other, such a machismo image that families in rural America will proudly pose for Christmas card photos brandishing their heavy-duty firearms.
Six: gun manufacturers—whereby we learned somewhat recently our nation’s gun proliferation is directly linked to the mighty dollar.
Seven: suck it up—whereby we realized generations ago that guns are Americans’ sacred history, the only reason we suppressed the Natives since the 16th century and our oppressors in 1776 and ever since all the Others who we perceive as standing in the way of what we claim is our God-given land, manifest destiny and rights to happiness and prosperity else a bullet hit you between the eyes.
So to Mr. Daltrey and all the rest of the citizens of Earth who are more than befuddled by the U.S. gun problem, let me, a native white American, explain. In the U.S., unfortunately guns are our history and by now two centuries later must be part of our DNA. It’s not physically in our DNA but emotionally, socially and culturally. The belief in guns (really, in the U.S., we believe in guns) is in our blood. Funny, it’s like sleeping with a snake.
Stupid and dumb, we brought this upon ourselves.
As for really packing up and heading to England, where ancestry.com showed I have most of my heritage, I remain ambivalent, not yet solidly determined. Another Trump presidency would likely send me researching jobs and life overseas. The countries where today’s Americans, called ex-Pats, are going to spend the rest of their lives were well established hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
The U.S., in contrast, is still a baby nation. And we the people have been acting like that long enough. To leave the land of my birth does not frighten me as much as playing Russian roulette with each day I live and shop and work and worship in the U.S. It’s only a matter of time before every family in this country is touched by gun violence. That’s how the majority of Americans finally soured on the Vietnam War—when every family had members fighting the unwinnable war and returning either in body bags or physically disabled and psychologically wounded. Once every American family experiences a senseless gun death or injury, gun control will be law of the land. And Americans might want to stay here then and only then.