Reply #87: If I were 10 years younger...

[Boomer]

I would probably be making plans to move to another country, but I'm just shy of 50 and the physical effort (not to mention financial disruption) involved in such an undertaking is really daunting. Also, my approaching-the-hill age would make it that much harder to qualify for immigration and get re-established in a new job market.

The Bush Administration has heightened my dissatisfaction with living here, but my disconnect with America runs much deeper than who is president. I'm increasingly at odds with the culture itself -- the emphasis on money and conspicuous consumption, the blatant anti-intellectualism, an odd mix of sexual vulgarity and prudery, unrelenting glamorization of violence, religious extremism, and an escalating patriotic zeal that has crossed the line into idolatry.

None of these issues is a sudden, over-night phenomena -- more a gradual but unabating tide that keeps rising and rising, taking over a greater proportion of the population each year. I don't think it can be fought so much as simply withstood. Having gravitated to small town life I'm a little more exposed as out-of-step than I would be in an urban population where beleaguered bands of secular humanists can gather together, but returning to the city is high price to pay for my social dislocation.

Mostly, I just don't find the U.S. to be a civilized country. We have a high standard of technological gadgets and physical hygiene, but not a high standard of living. To my mind a high standard of living involves affordable public transportation, small neighborhoods with sidewalks, dining at family restaurants rather than fast-food drive-ins, walking at night without fear of assault, and conducting conversations about politics and literature with your average person on the street.

Paving over the entire country with super-highways and erecting sterile suburban neighborhoods grouped around shopping malls is my idea of Hell on Earth, but it seems to be the blue-print for the American Dream.

--Boomer