Morning Pages: August 10th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Kitties and tops!

So yesterday, I think I watched more than an entire season of "Parks and Rec", Season 3 and part of season 4. It's pretty wild because I think most people do this during their teenage years, and not when they're adults. I'm not sure whether I'm angry that I wasted my weekend, I'm afraid that I'm developing an addiction to TV, or I'm proud I'm developing an addiction to TV and I'm less of a book fanatic.

I think the news that a President, any President, is cutting "entitlement" spending via executive order is making me reconsider staying in this country. It's generally a lot easier to destroy things than to build them, and I don't think we'll get back to where we were as a country 5 years ago in my lifetime. I could stay here and play the game of "what suffering will the next Republican president bring?" but I don't think there's any point in being a hero. If I do stay here, it'll probably be somewhere I can run away from easily, like to the mountains or across the border or something.

So, I'm taking a look at where good places to live around the world are. U.S. West Coast is less shiny to me now, not just because of the quality of living, but also because of questionable access to fresh water (from a Great Lakes guy) and how far away it is from other population centers. Chicago / Minnesota seem pretty nice, but if you needed to run across the border where exactly would you be running to? So that leaves New England + Quebec and the Canadian Eastern Provinces (like New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, etc.). The problem is I find it extremely doubtful Canada could resist a full-scale U.S. invasion in any meaningful capacity, and living in an occupied territory would be about as fun as living in Iraq or Afghanistan. I wonder if the U.S. would come apart at the seams before that happened, and whether New England would resist. I don't know how other parts of the world look to me. Europe looks vulnerable to Russian invasion without U.S. intervention, it's too dense to have large areas survive a nuclear attack, and it's more ethnic unions rather than political unions. Asia might have many of the same problems with China, on top of the fact that I probably don't fit into the Eastern ethos and the underlying authoritarianism.

Maybe I'm overthinking this. D.C. is still pretty nice, and if the country stops being a democracy in the near future the new order will still need a capital to rule its subjects from. And this is my home, and thinking about running from my problems in anathema to every fiber in my being. Why should I have to run from what somebody else did? When could I ever stop running? It's just that 80-odd years ago some Jews in Germany thought the same thing, and they got turned into ashes for their beliefs, and I don't think I could do that to my parents (take their sacrifices and place them at the altar of naivete by staying here and sticking my head in the sand).