I can't live in this country anymore.

[DFW]

33. Oh, you'd be surprised what a person can put up with.

I know people from the former East Germany who spent months in jail for the crime of having a coin collection. Before 1989, they used to shoot their own people trying to go over the Berlin Wall. I've been interrogated in East Berlin in a windowless room where I was the only one without a gun, an East German uniform or the right to stand up without permission. I've visited Caribbean islands steeped in poverty you couldn't believe. I visited Cuba in the 1980s, got followed everywhere by the secret police (and I was there at THEIR government's invitation), and pleaded with by people on the street who had a keen eye for who was a westerner, and who was not.

This doesn't mean shut up and count your blessings. It means we have something worth fighting for, and I say this as one who has been living abroad for years. But I go back several times a year, still keep my connections with the States, still make lots of contributions to candidates and causes I believe in, and keep in touch with people back home that I agree with AND with whom I disagree. Moving abroad may be a solution, but paradise is nowhere. For all the people extolling the virtues of the Nordic countries, I wonder how many live there and speak the language? I don't live there, but I speak Swedish well, and go up there on occasion. They are struggling with a growing nasty neo-Nazi rightist movement nurtured by preventable stupidity on the left. The number of evil-looking skinheads on Swedish streets is unnerving. It's no paradise up there, either.

EVERY country here in Europe has its issues. My wife is German, has retired from her job as a social worker, but keeps busy doing--what else? Social work. She volunteers with remedial help at a German elementary school. Why? Because the vaunted German educational system is very Darwinian, and leaves behind children who do not learn as quickly as others. Indeed, it wanted to prevent my elder daughter from going to college because her high school teachers said she didn't speak up enough in class (she was shy by nature), and gave her bad grades for it. She ended up going to college in the USA and had to ask me just before graduation what a "valedictorian" was and why did it mean she had to give a speech in English in front of 1000 people? In Germany, she would have ended up waiting on tables. I'm here because both my wife (she's the only one left with a living parent, and her mom speaks no English) and my job demanded it.

If you have nothing holding you down, by all means check out your alternatives, but check them out THOROUGHLY. The grass is not always greener, even if it looks that way from afar.