I’m not the type of person to give up. I decided I will be going back to America, and I refuse to go live somewhere and not participate in it. It’s your duty as a citizen of a nation to participate in its politics, and if I am going to live in a country, I refuse to let it down.
Ok, 10 things to keep in mind, aka a primer on US politics and state of mind:
1- I read years ago that most US passports are used only for one trip. Whether or not that is really true, we tend not to know much or care much about the rest of the world. Since we have run it, why bother? But to be fair, we have only two friendly borders, and huge oceans separate us from the rest of the world, so there is little reason to pay attention to what goes on elsewhere.
2- A significant number of Americans consider the US the greatest country in the history of the world. Really. No comparisons made, we just somehow know it.
3- There is a pathological sense of fair play and equality that pervades the US populace, despite our flaws.
4- Latin America, with whom we share a hemisphere, does not exist in our consciousness. Check that, it does exist. But Cuba is the largest country in Latin America by far. It's history began in 1959 with Castro. Nothing happened between the US and Cuba before then. Politicians can safely reach out to China or Russia, but not the rebellious child Cuba.
5- Canadians are just Americans who are more polite and who have national health care.
6- We are very aware that the evil Soviets invaded or overthrew governments or popular movements in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, so we understand how Russia still makes Europe nervous, but we are generally unaware that the US did the same to Chile, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala during the same period, and thus have difficulty understanding why we have made Latin America nervous at times.
7- Thanks to Trump, we in the west/southwest of the US worry that Mexicans will immigrate illegally and change all our place names to Spanish.
8- We think that democracy is our gift to the world, and there is some truth to that, despite the Greeks, but our real gifts are jazz, rock and roll, and Hollywood.
9- We eat too much. Walk too little.
10- We have had a problem with racism, but we also had Willie Mays and Louie Armstrong who conquered despite that, Louie being the greatest American figure of the 20th century.