American Exodus

Love It or Leave It

What Happens to a Brain Drained America?

It’s tough to watch, especially as a foreigner, a country lurch from one jarring event to the next, with barely enough time to digest and make sense of one before the next one is upon us.

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine dominated headlines for quite a while. There was shock and outrage that in 2022 one sovereign nation would invade another for what seemed like made up reasons. The West would help Ukraine with military hardware and sanctions on the aggressor. The Republicans who sided with Putin quickly shut their traps and no one remembers what they said anymore anyway.

The war rages on over there and appears to be ramping up again, although it probably never actually ramped down. The sanctions are not having the desired effect, Europe is going to have a cold winter and Ukrainians continue to die. Russians too, probably.

But then there was a series of shooting rampages. Focus shifted to that, less to the events themselves — they seem to be a part of the furniture in America now — but more to the intractable debate about whether or not the government should play a role in restricting the purchase of military grade assault weapons by ordinary citizens.

The mass shootings continue, unabated. Uvalde, a month ago, is on page 3 of the Gun Violence Archive website. There have been 55 more events since then. There were seven on June 26 alone.

A nation feels outrage and pain and then has no choice but to shrug its collective shoulders. Violence is just part of the natural order, in which people are set in constant competition with each other and kept both in a state of fear and at each other’s throats.

Then the January 6th Hearings started and that’s where attention went next. As a result of a meticulously laid out cavalcade of GOP staffers who suddenly found their moral compass in time to save their own rodent skins, this committee has Donald Trump dead to rights on planning and leading (though of course not directly taking part) an ego driven and sociopathically minded insurrection to prevent the legally elected government from taking power.

It might not matter, but because his supporters are immune to facts, consider the hearings illegitimate and will doubtless not be pleased with its findings. Americans have already seen what these people are capable of and so, are holding their collective breath.

And the only thing worse than putting him on trial would be not putting him on trial.

And now, the repeal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, has wiped away 50 years of women’s right to control their own reproductive systems, all at the behest of a relatively tiny movement of white supremacist Christian evangelicals who have an outsized role in government for the people, by the people and of the people. Or whatever.

Think about this for a second. A political party that has managed to win one popular vote in the last thirty years and is not currently in power has the ability to decide policy and law. And that’s called a democracy.

It’s a debate that every other country in the western world had and decided on and left behind decades ago.

But not the US. Not in a country that is dominated by a relatively tiny handful of people who associate themselves with the Christian Evangelical Right Wing.

I think we can fairly call these people CINO’s (Christian in Name Only) at this point as the type of beliefs they adhere to of hatred, oppression of minorities, exclusion, misogyny, homophobia, racism et cetera, are about as far removed from the original teachings of Jesus Christ two millennia ago as can be imagined.

But hold up. That’s still not all.

This is all without yet mentioning the high cost of absolutely everything that is woven into the whole narrative. Inflation, supply chain crises, environmental destruction all come together at the same time to lead people to believe that something is really wrong here.

But hang on just one more minute. This has all happened in the last month.

Americans are dumbfounded. They are flummoxed. They are stunned. They seem to be just hanging on and trying to figure out how to survive this unending onslaught of things they thought only happened in other countries, while trying to keep their own hamster wheels moving at all costs.

Americans are exhausted by a constant and disorienting barrage of events, both those that are predictable and those that are not, since 2016 and arguably further back than that.

The level of violence and hatred that is harnessed by politicians and the oligarchs that own them to keep people divided, distracted and voting against their own best interests would make anyone run for cover.

And so, some of those who can are making plans to leave. You can hardly blame them, any more than you can blame Hondurans and Haitians for risking everything to get to America. Many have already left and are reporting back to their fellow citizens about what life is like in other parts of the world.

It’s probably not in droves just yet, the amount of people leaving, but you can imagine it being such one day. Who would ever have thought that the traffic of refugees, migrant workers and immigrants could begin to flow the other way?

Except that now we are expats and digital nomads and van life influencers**. The distinction of labels is important. They underline one’s privilege, or lack of it. Money and more specifically the spending power of the US dollar in less developed countries can make any one of them a soft place to land. To live like a king. And to believe automatically that a warm welcome will be offered there.

I think that the brain drain that perpetually plagues countries that can’t or won’t provide security, safety and a basic standard of living for their citizens (shithole countries, to some) that has been happening for some time in the US is about to really kick off now and the chickens are coming home to roost.

You cannot fault people for wanting to get out at this point. However, a mass exodus might not be such a good thing, as everyone who has the privilege, skill, education, imagination, vision, and creativity necessary to be able to live somewhere else is one less voice against the oppression of non-dominant groups by a tiny, but dominant minority.

And maybe that’s been the plan of the CINO Evangelical Right all along.

There will be an inevitable impact of these fleeing Americans on America, no question. But at what point do we also acknowledge their impact on the economic and social fabric of the places they end up? That’s another article, I suppose.

**I have to acknowledge the fact that, as many of my readers will already know, I am a westerner living in a developing country. Am I part of the problem or part of the solution? I wonder about the answer to that every day. It’s not a privilege. It is privilege.

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