Costa Rica currently has a good President and a legit democracy, but they haven’t been without trouble including battles over their constitution and Presidential term limits.
Interesting question is how much the government in the escape country matters. Is it becoming a citizen of a better place or something of a removal of a feeling of responsibility?
Seems like CR is a bit of an imperialist/ex-pat carve-out in Central America. 66% of people there identify as white and 14% as mestizo. So, that’s a lot like the US or Canada. I dunno, I’m just saying wherever anyone goes is likely to have plenty of problems. Is it just that you/we won’t take them so personally?
It wasn’t why I moved, but I’ve enjoyed the feeling that I’m less implicated in what the UK is up to since leaving. France is no better and I learn more and more about the specifics of that the longer I stay, but there’s still an increase of peace of mind.
This is a super-fair question that I think about a lot re: motivation to move. At least on the conscious level, there are a couple factors that ring true for us.
Living somewhere is essentially an investment. We acquire things, establish friendships, and put down roots that further our ties to a place and build the foundation for our children’s future well-being. When outside forces threaten the value of those investments and tear down the life we’ve built, we start to wonder whether we’d be better off investing elsewhere. Note: we may be overly-sensitive to this feeling given that we are quite literally living in a fixer-upper that we’ve invested a significant portion of our lives into during the past three years.
We want to feel at least mediocre about where our tax money is going and - in general - the policies/culture we implicitly support via residency. My wife is a pediatric speech language pathologist. I primarily work with children/adolescents. We both really struggle writing checks for a country that separates immigrant families, under-funds childcare/education, and increasingly trends toward viewing the most-vulnerable with distaste rather than compassion.
No place is perfect, and we do need to be careful about not taking the US for granted, but we also don’t feel any particular US loyalty just because we were born here. The statistical chance that our current nationality is the best possible option seems low enough that the alternatives are worth seriously exploring.
This is partly why my target destination is Montreal. I am not blind to Quebec’s nationalism and its undertones of xenophobia and bigotry, but it’s a relatively foreign culture with a dominant language I am unlikely to ever be fluent in. I can remain oblivious to a lot of it. Half of the reason I want to leave is for greener pastures, but the other half is so I can tune it all out and not care anymore.
There is some truth to this. Canada’s main role globally has been as a natural resource exporter. So at a macro level the economy depends a lot of environmental destruction.
Much of Canada is like the town in Twin Peaks (without the supernatural demons and stuff, that’s just Hamilton). The surface level is genuinely friendly and community based positivity, with a substantial seedy underbelly.
No but I meant that this was not just a superficial politeness. These people were inviting me into their houses for dinner, and out to their camps for drinking and smoking for days at a time. The group I met were almost all fisherman (and their friends/family) that were getting paid not to fish due to the depletion of groundfish off the coast. I spent my entire vacation with this crowd in a little place called Meteghan. They also introduced me to the music of Steve Earle. One of the best weeks of my life - I wish I had kept in touch with them.
I agree there are lots of nice Americans. I’ve met plenty on my travels. What really separates America and Canada in this area is that America has an embarrassingly high percentage of bombastic assholes. Like 10% of Americans are just awful, awful people to be around.
Where you live now is a conservative enclave? Like where we met up at the Mexican spot?
Man, that felt like a liberal paradise to me. I know there’s a lot of money in that area and all, and probably some Romney types, but damn it felt worlds better than even the liberal places I’ve lived on the east coast.
Yeah I’ve thought about this too, like it’s very easy to go to Mexico from the US if you’ve got any reasonable amount of money… But, am I really moving to a better country to live in? Or am I just absolving myself of responsibility and giving myself permission not to think about it?
I think if the country doesn’t have single payer healthcare and a better functioning democracy than ours, I’m just doing the second one… And there aren’t that many countries that meet those criteria that I can just move to as a live poker pro.
Oh hell yeah. We met in El Segundo. El Segundo is George Bush to Manhattan Beach’s Mitt Romney. Now if you want to really get Trumpy you gotta head out of town a little. But,yeah, I’m talking relative to the incredibly left/liberal parts of Berkeley and Oakland.
Why do you have to move to a better country though? It’s not like moving to a better country helps anyone and it may not even help you. It depends. Anyway, fuck countries; all of them.
It’s incredibly poor from what I remember idk. Suppose I’ll make my old man happy and go visit it soon. Apparently my grandfather was in the Latvian SS . Also learning that language would be a total pita.
. Also learning that language would be a total pita.