Greetings from Stockholm
I can see the U.S. from here
I started this newsletter because of the emails. The emails come in like clockwork after every mass shooting. After the big ones, the emails spike. Since I moved to Sweden in 2019, I’ve become the person you find when you’ve had enough.
“I want out,” they say. “I can’t take it anymore.”
They come from friends, and friends of friends. They come from former colleagues, some close and some not. From people I went to school with, who are now middle aged and struggling to come to terms with a changed landscape the same way I did. From my former chiropractor’s wife. From my sister’s 7th grade French teacher, and from folks from the old neighborhood. They come from a lot of people.
They have questions. Because I got out, I’m considered an authority. How hard is it to get a job there? How can I get a visa? How can I get residency? How hard is it to learn the language? I will need a really good hairdresser—is that going to be difficult? My grandfather was from Italy/Ireland/Germany/Austria/Hungary/Poland; can I get citizenship by descent? What’s the food like? Can I study for a master’s in English? Can I bring my dog? What about a PhD? I’m on a strange cocktail of medications—are these meds available there? Where can I buy my way in?
The emails surged after the shooting at King Soopers in Boulder, and again after the one at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo. After the Monterey Park shooting at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where people were celebrating the Lunar New Year, I got six emails in one morning. And after a shooter attacked the Just-in-Time bowling alley in sleepy Lewiston, Maine, where I had studied at Bates College, there were four. But then came Uvalde.
Uvalde wasn’t the biggest, with 19 dead and 17 injured. Sandy Hook, which was a 20-minute drive from my children’s school in Connecticut, took 26 lives, most of them six year olds. And in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, 60 died. But Uvalde was one of the worst. It was kids, in a school, with incompetent cops standing uselessly in the hallways. Eleven emails in three days. Eleven. It seemed like some kind of tipping point. The emails told me that something is happening.
I don’t know about permit requirements in Asia or Latin America or Africa or anywhere else. But the EU is closing its doors. Even during the four-plus years that I’ve been in Sweden, restrictions have tightened. When I lived in Budapest as a journalist back in the 1990s, there were hundreds of Americans in the city and nobody had a residence permit. We all just crossed a border every three months, thereby renewing our tourist visas. It was easy. But those days are over. It’s a lot of work now to figure out a path and then to make it work.
I want to help my friends but then again, there’s only so much I can do. My friend Allen pestered me constantly. His work wasn’t in a field that would easily translate into a job in Europe. His grandparents were born in the U.S., and so were his great-grandparents. His wife had been born in Geneva, but she was also in the process of divorcing him. And he couldn’t get in through his adult kids, despite their EU passports. It was looking dark. And he wrote so often with so many questions that I lost my patience.
“Look, the only route I can see for you is through marriage,” I wrote him. “Go out and find a European and fuck them, OK?”
I don’t intend to write only about mass shootings and EU visas and Allen’s problems. I want to write about expats/immigrants and how we roll, the agony and the ecstasy of life as a stranger in a strange land. I want to explore the increasing untenability of American life, which was only hazily discernible in 2019 but has now burst into full view, terrible and fascinating at the same time. I want to write about what it feels like to leave a country that you love, that broke your heart into a thousand pieces and that won’t let go. And I want to write about life on the other side of that decision. I’m planning to use this space to discuss all that and more and I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Love reading an ”outsider” point of view on Sweden 🇸🇪 And your insight in the US
I've also occasionally heard from contacts about leaving the US, but it is usually more musing than an idea that could develop into a plan. A few people have said it was 'brave' of us to flee, though I don't see it that way, since the issue that drove us to leave 15 years ago was healthcare. Surviving and avoiding financial devastation doesn't feel like bravery to me.
One can argue that how healthcare is practiced in the U.S. sometimes comprises a form of violence--economic violence, clearly, but to cause suffering in the name of satisfying shareholders can be seen that way as well.
Safety and security arrive in different guises, whether safety from gun violence or the security of knowing that if you become ill or an accident befalls you, there will be care and it will not bankrupt you.
It's hard not to be angry about the things that drove us away. But it is also hard to not keep looking back, wishing for things to change for our families and fellow U.S. citizens. I hope some of our observations help, even if in some small way. Things don't have to remain the way they are.