Thanks Obama
How my life has changed since 2008
Since the election of Barack Obama nearly 8 years ago, my life has changed completely. Except I’ve spent almost the entirety of his two terms in office—some seven-and-a-half years—living in Europe, where my perspective is a little different.
You’ll recall at the time that the economy was in the toilet. By the time of Obama’s inauguration, Bear Stearns had stopped existing and a glimpse at the news provided harrowing numbers: 30,000 layoffs, from a single company! Things soon got worse. It wasn’t long before the guillotine reached my place of business: FedEx Freight. There had been whispers from the previous summer that business was slowing down and management would need to make cuts.
I was a forklift operator, near the bottom of the full-time list; but there were plenty of part-timers, so it seemed like there was some cushion to fall back on should push come to shove. Wishful thinking. Me and a few other employees got the call to meet with the terminal manager and the head of human resources. The look on their faces told us what we already suspected. We were getting laid off ourselves.
There’s a gut-wrenching feeling of hopelessness when your job is swept out from under your feet. At the time, I was around 25 years old, overly-educated (though I don’t believe there is such a thing as too much education), and basically looking for an excuse to step away from good money.
In other words, I had never intended to work at FedEx my entire life, so while it sucked to be suddenly unemployed while still saddled with a car payment and student loans, it was also, in retrospect, a liberating experience.
For my colleagues, though, it was like staring down the meat grinder. They were older men, men who had decided a year or two before to stop working two jobs to become full-time at FedEx. They had other mouths to feed, a wife in poor health, insurance costs, mortgages, etc. One of them put his hand over his eyes, but he wasn’t about to cry.
We were given a choice. Our manager explained there wasn’t enough work for us…for the time being. Maybe in 3 or 6 months we’d be able to return to our jobs, but there wasn’t any guarantee. We could collect unemployment—at the time I think it was for a maximum of 9 months—and wait. Or, we could accept a severance package, take the money & run.
There was some confusion at the table. “Do I have to make this decision…like…now?”
“No, no! Take your time,” the HR guy went on to explain.
So, the way I saw it, I had a few options. I could either:
- Wait to return to my old job
- Find a new job elsewhere
- Have an adventure
You should know from my first paragraph what option I chose. It hasn’t been always been easy.
I decided to teach English as a foreign language in Prague, Czech Republic. But that decision wasn’t so simple at the time. There were a lot of variables and I had to do what my father likes to call, “due diligence.” I think he just wanted me to be sure I knew what I was getting into.
Because moving to a foreign country is a step into the unknown.
You know what’s funny? While I was unemployed and living at home until waiting for my flight to Prague, I managed to save more money than at any point while I was working. What’s less funny is the countdown to departure, and having to say goodbye to loved ones, close friends, and my dog.
As the days ticked towards zero, I spent a lot of time with my two close friends, Jeremy and Matt. We were like the Three Musketeers, or maybe more like 3 of the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse. We called Matt’s orange pickup the Paragon of Doom. Jeremy had lost his job around the same time I did, so we spent a lot of our free time playing Call of Duty: World at War and going to the bar, where we’d order a bucket of Busch to start the night.
Months passed in this way. The Penguins won the Stanley Cup that year. Jeremy met a girl (they now have 3 kids together). Matt had started to see someone around the same time (they now have a baby girl). Just a couple weeks before I left, Matt’s dad passed away.
Sometimes life gets spinning so fast it seems like the fabric of our existence is being ripped apart. I went into overdrive trying to be there to support my friend, knowing all too soon I’d be gone, transformed into a fictive, almost mythological element in people’s lives.
The hard part about homesickness is the people.
I said my goodbyes and shed some tears and then boarded a plane. I didn’t have a return ticket.
Prague was a revelation. I’ve written about it extensively elsewhere. It was there that I met a girl myself, and at the end of 2010, we moved to France, where I’ve been ever since.
I still visit home, although the cost is prohibitive to visiting every year. The first time I visited home was after my first year in Prague. I remember having a layover in Minneapolis before my connecting flight to St. Louis. There is a large English speaking community in Prague, but out in public, everyone speaks Czech. The ears get used to hearing a language, even one it doesn’t understand.
People talk about culture shock in the sense of experiencing a new place for the first time. It can happen on a short trip, but the effects are more deeply felt during a longer stay, when the oddities of everyday existence came to the forefront. But reverse culture shock is something altogether stranger.
So I was sitting there in the airport of Minneapolis, listening to music on my iPod, when I decided to save the battery and turn it off. A TV was blaring the national news, men and women were shuffling to and fro to get to their boarding gate, and people all around me were sitting there talking. The strange part is that I could understand all of it.
See, when you are in a foreign country and don’t have 100% mastery of the language, it’s easy to be charmed by the sounds of this unfamiliar tongue. You invent conversations, imagine what people are talking about. It’s easy to forget that most people talk about the most banal shit.
Stereotypically, Americans are considered loud-mouths, and I suddenly understood why. Two teenage girls were interjecting every other word with ‘like’ and I was, like, starting to lose my mind. The talking head on the TV was blathering on about Obama this, Obama that, when Obama himself popped onto the screen and talked some common sense. I then went to the airport bar and ordered a beer and a shot of whiskey.
The world of language is ordered chaos, informed by reason, inflamed by emotion. I prefer writing to speaking because the poetry of prose speaks to me. The spoken word has the tendency to blather on, a mishmash of syllables, and although I recognize and respect its power, I’ve always been a reader.
It occurred to me this summer that I have now spent more than half of my dog’s life living abroad. He turned 12 in September. There’s always fear in the back of my mind of him or someone else I know and love dying before I get a chance to see them again.
It’s a horrible feeling when things happen to people you know and care for because there is literally an ocean between us. I hang on to social media to stay in touch with people, in spite of contrary politics and the proliferation of cat gifs, or the addictive neediness of clicking refresh on Facebook. We all make certain sacrifices.
I like France, even though there are things about it that annoy me. I don’t like how you can’t turn right on red here. I hate having to go to an actual pharmacy if I want to buy some Advil. I’m not crazy about most things being closed on Sundays. But it’s treated me well on the whole.
Life was difficult at first. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a work visa, and I didn’t speak the language. I had two ephemeral things: persistence and hope. The visa and job were intertwined in a kind of Catch-22, where I couldn’t have one without the other. Fortunately, my girlfriend discovered that if we got either married or entered into a civil partnership, I could apply for a visa by way of something called “Vie privé et familiale.”
It was a pain in the ass.
The process requires documents upon documents, visits to the local immigration prefecture, and proof that your relationship is real rather than some sham to game the system.
Before I left America, I never gave much thought about immigration—until I had to go through the process myself.
It’s a grueling, expensive ordeal. And I’m not even an immigrant! I’m an expatriate; that is, someone who lives outside his native country. But I can empathize with people who have left their homes in search of better jobs and opportunities, away from civil war or unrest, or who move to a foreign land (as I did) for something as uncategorizable as love.
I have students who ask me what the difference between Europe and America is. They’re not so different, really. I’ve compared it to looking at a funhouse mirror. The image remains basically the same, it’s just distorted, depending on your perspective.
Differences dissolve when you take the time to get to know someone. Nothing can rewrite our histories or experiences, and there are always conflicting opinions, but we all have the same basic needs.
Anytime I am traveling to another country and stuck waiting in line in passport control, I’m always struck by the artificiality of borders and the imaginary construct of the concept of money. We are living in a prison of our own design.
So, I titled this article “Thanks Obama.” But why? (Besides irony, of course.) At the end of the day, presidents are people. But they’re also leaders and symbols.
When I was a freshman in college and those two planes flew into the World Trade Center, President Bush became the subject of my ire. Not because of what happened, but because of what followed. I disagreed with the War on Terror, I chanted “No blood for oil!” at campus protests, and the cumulative effect made me feel less proud to be an American.
I don’t take much stock in superpowers or hyperpowers, and it doesn’t matter to me if China is the richest country in the world. I care about this planet and I care about the people on it. I look at my country from afar and feel pride, though there are reasons to cringe and wince. The American reputation has improved since I left home, and to a degree, I feel like an unofficial ambassador for the American brand.
Still, it hurts to see my country in pain. A country divided is no country at all. I take stock in realizing a president is not a panacea, nor is a president perfect. However, a president should inspire, as both an ideal and an example.
When the sands of history are swept aside, our descendants will see us for who we truly are. I live for today and dream for tomorrow. In celestial terms, the existential insignificance of our own lives are the echoes of faint stars.
Shine bright.
Thanks for reading!
