Lost in transit

Aprés lui, le deluge

No one is an accidental expat. Anyone who leaves their home country – whether it's for reasons as carefree as wanting to taste adventure in far-off lands or as devastating as fleeing an oppressive dictator to save their lives – has to put a fair amount of willpower into it. It's not easy to leave the land where you first learned to speak, where your parents raised you, where you know the names of everything without having to ask someone. No matter where you go, you still came from somewhere, and that somewhere is your culture, your background, your point of reference, and no matter how many new passports you collect, it's still – in some way and in some small part – your Home.

So even though there's much I don't like about American culture, values, politics, and so on, and even though I've actively wanted to move out of the U.S. for most of my life, and even though I've always identified as a New Yorker and not an American, I can't deny that the U.S. is still where I come from, and it has a certain importance in my life that I'll never be able to expunge. And so the events of the past week have struck me with an indelible sadness, and shock, and most of all, shame. No one – no matter what their culture, values, or politics – should have to go through what the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have been going through for the past number of days. How can the most powerful country in the world allow an entire city to fall beneath the waves and leave its poorest citizens to die on their rooftops? If you polled 9 out of 10 average Americans on where they'd rather live, the U.S. or Thailand, they'd all say, "America's the greatest country in the world – why would I want to live anywhere else?" And yet when the tsunami struck out of nowhere on a clear morning, the government of Thailand (and of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, etc.) sprang into action to help its people. They brought in people, they brought in trucks, they brought in elephants, for god's sake. The U.S. government, who had days of advance warning, dragged their collective feet and smiled for the cameras, insisting that everything was fine and help was on the way. But can they really say that to the face of the man whose mother, an elderly woman trapped in her nursing home, drowned after five days of waiting for someone to come and rescue her?

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one staring up at the naked emperor and wondering why the hell no one else can see he's not wearing any clothes. And I want to shake everyone else by the shoulders and force them to see past the red-white-and-blue-colored blinders they've got on, because they don't deserve to live like this. No one does, not anywhere, and it's the least understandable when something like this happens in one of the richest nations on the globe, a country whose federal stationery budget could feed an entire developing nation, a country where the rich get massive tax cuts while the poor send their children off to die in foreign countries because at least in the military they'll get some health insurance.

I'm torn between feeling so glad not to be back there, and so sad that the people I love still are. Or that anyone has to be, really.

If you haven't already, please give some money to relief efforts.