Love it or ... oh yeah, leaving

So my papers are finally in order, I can rejoin my wife and children and live happily ever after in Canada, come June.

“Won’t you miss the United States?” says my imaginary friend, the one who asks me stupid questions as a prep for people who ask me equally stupid questions in a well-meaning way.

Short answer: No.

I’ve lived abroad for better than half a decade in my adult life. Not on military bases, something most Americans see as living abroad, which is hilariously mistaken – it’s about as foreign as living in a WalMart surrounded by barbed wire. In any case, those years living abroad, learning other languages, cultural mores and eating other food have done what no amount of study or forum-spasms could: It’s made me realize that nations are an abstracted, outdated concept kept in place by governments that would cease to be without them.

The world is made of people and cultures, not nations, states or borders.

So no, I won’t miss the nationalistic land of my birth, which proudly, but with heartwrenching ignorance, screams “we are the best county on earth” and fails to see how it has frittered away its golden opportunities.

I’m not a prophet of disaster. I’m sure the U.S. will eventually adapt, work out how to survive in a century that has (culturally and politically) left it behind, but I don’t really care. My attachments are to people and places, not to squares of colored fabric on poles or imaginary lines on maps.

A lot of people mumble about being global citizens and internationally savvy, but I have news for you, once you become globalized, you realize a more basic truth; you’re just a person, as is your neighbor, and your neighbor’s neighbor, all the way around the blue planet we all dwell on. There aren’t any meaningful clubs, nations, tribes, unions, republics, monarchies or cults. There are just people.

Living your life in adherence to things other than people makes for violence and death, for pogroms and racism and holy wars and zealotry of all sorts. I’m not going to do that, and you shouldn’t, either.

Besides, the poutine is really tasty in Canada, and caesars are just delicious.