No, You’re Not Moving To Canada
Just let it go with the “moving to Canada” thing. Yes, I went through it when W was re-elected. I even half-jokingly looked at Toronto real estate when I was up there for a convention recently. It’s nice there.
But you’ll need a visa/work permit, a new job, a new home (one with good schools for your terrified disappointed kids to transfer into if you have children), and you’ll still be U.S. citizens for many years before you can even entertain becoming Canadian.
Yeah, they do a lot of things better up there, but it’s imperfect too. Trudeau is dreamy, but he replaced Stephen Harper, who was a Bushesque conservative who finagled his way into office with a minority government, violated campaign finance laws, and tried to stay in power with parliamentary trickery (oh, and there were record deficits when he was in charge — sound familiar?).
So you’re probably not moving to Canada. I’ll admit it’s a fun thought experiment/fantasy. I do it too sometimes. Literally all of my ancestors were Canadian, so it’d be like going back to my people. I’m personally reserving the “move to Canada” option for if we ever institute a draft for an illegitimate war and my kids are still draft age. It’d be a privileged-as-hell thing to do, but I’d do anything for my kids.
Our best bet is to hunker down, remember why there’s a Senate filibuster and actually be thankful for it now, prepare for mid-term elections in 2018 and try to take back congress, and work hard to protect to the people most vulnerable to the dangerous people we’ve mistakenly empowered. I’m probably going to spend a lot of the next four years pissed off at the news and using my new blood pressure cuff. Hopefully I can figure out how to channel that rage into something remotely productive for once in my damned life. There’s still lots of stuff going on at state and local levels that probably affect your daily life a whole lot more than whatever bullshit they spin in Washington.
A lot of the people who elected Trump are angry that they’ve been left behind, and rightly so. Our economy favors globalization and automation, and those things have done little to help anyone but the already well-off. Throw in a dash of social wedge issues and blatant racism and xenophobia, and this should surprise nobody. We’d be smart to learn from that. Unfortunately I have ironclad confidence in the DNC to learn nothing from it, but all we can do is try.
