well, this is...horrible.

I started the process of getting us a residence visa in Europe, just so there's one other country we can go call home if we need to. Now is the time to do it, before the rise of fascism and the escalating refugee crises have countries locking their immigration down.

Are we going to permanently relocate to Europe? Hopefully not, but it's not been a great decade for hope. Obviously, we'd far rather go to Canada, but Canada (understandably) makes it a much, much bigger commitment and risk. J feels the need to have an exit strategy, but has no context or experience to understand what it really means to live abroad, especially if you're crossing an ocean to a place that doesn't speak English.

Despite seeing the need, I've held off doing this, irrationally hoping events would save me all the paperwork and expense and logistical nightmares. The impartial analysis part of my brain just keeps saying "told you so."

I've never really been tempted to renounce U.S. citizenship: it's a dramatic step with a lot of knock-on effects, and I'm neither wealthy nor mercenary enough to do it for tax reasons, and then just fuck off to my 5-bedroom pied-à-terre in Zurich. We've been having a very privileged life in an even more privileged country, and life is difficult enough without voluntarily making it that much harder out of some blend of principle and spite. We live more or less sustainably in a place with nice people, and good food, and world-class medical care a few miles away. Our water situation is just waiting to snap back into our face, but the most we can really do about it is to move to a state with a proper rain cycle.

But if the U.S. unambiguously voted for a fascist who is not only deporting permanent residents—better to say "permanent" at this point—to a slave gulag in another country, and is deporting citizens born here...what's the point of citizenship that doesn't offer the most basic protection of "you are allowed to live here"?

(I'm glossing over the full panoply of evil shit going on. It's so, so, so much worse than it looks.)

 So, I dunno. It's Plan B. We don't want to leave and start over. But it's not looking great.