Once again, you are mirroring many of my experiences and thoughts as an American immigrant in Portugal! It's really uncanny. I also felt like the U.S. stopped trying to live up to It's promises at least 20 years ago, but really more like over 40 years ago, or basically my entire lifetime. It's been going downhill ever since neoliberalism first gained a foothold under Reagan (and Thatcher in the UK). The glaring contradictions and blatant hypocrisy of the U.S. gave me a severe case of moral injury.
Portugal has its problems, some of which I've written about recently. I've been working through the discomfort one experiences when expectations don't align with reality over the many encounters I've had here witnessing casual racism and xenophobia, for example. But I still get the strong sense that Portugal is actually trying to be good. The people who want it to be better are still the majority, I'm sure of it.
I left the U.S. because I no longer felt I could trust my fellow citizens to not be asleep at the wheel as the car of democracy careened off the cliff while the people who were awake and screaming inside the car were helplessly trapped. I jumped from the car before it got that close to the edge. We'll know soon whether enough were awakened in time to grab the wheel and slam the brakes.
I appreciate this perspective and am similarly disenchanted about the state of the States. But I must also admit that I became slightly disappointed with Sweden, too, when I realized that the great dream of many (if not most) Swedes is to turn Sweden into a copy of the United States. (People in Stockholm sometimes laughably refer to Stockholm as "the sixth borough of New York".) I find that the leftist political conscience that characterized so much of late-twentieth-century Sweden is simply dead. Or am I wrong?
Once again, you are mirroring many of my experiences and thoughts as an American immigrant in Portugal! It's really uncanny. I also felt like the U.S. stopped trying to live up to It's promises at least 20 years ago, but really more like over 40 years ago, or basically my entire lifetime. It's been going downhill ever since neoliberalism first gained a foothold under Reagan (and Thatcher in the UK). The glaring contradictions and blatant hypocrisy of the U.S. gave me a severe case of moral injury.
Portugal has its problems, some of which I've written about recently. I've been working through the discomfort one experiences when expectations don't align with reality over the many encounters I've had here witnessing casual racism and xenophobia, for example. But I still get the strong sense that Portugal is actually trying to be good. The people who want it to be better are still the majority, I'm sure of it.
I left the U.S. because I no longer felt I could trust my fellow citizens to not be asleep at the wheel as the car of democracy careened off the cliff while the people who were awake and screaming inside the car were helplessly trapped. I jumped from the car before it got that close to the edge. We'll know soon whether enough were awakened in time to grab the wheel and slam the brakes.
Perfect execution of the car metaphor.
"Sweden, at its core, is decent. It strives to be good. It’s trying. I used to feel like that about the U.S. too, but that was a long time ago."
This.
I appreciate this perspective and am similarly disenchanted about the state of the States. But I must also admit that I became slightly disappointed with Sweden, too, when I realized that the great dream of many (if not most) Swedes is to turn Sweden into a copy of the United States. (People in Stockholm sometimes laughably refer to Stockholm as "the sixth borough of New York".) I find that the leftist political conscience that characterized so much of late-twentieth-century Sweden is simply dead. Or am I wrong?