Not Perfect, Better

 It may appear to some readers from posts like yesterday's that I regret coming to Ireland. I understand why it could come across that way, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have never regretted moving here. Are there problems? Yup. Am I sometimes stressed, angry, frustrated, annoyed, etc? Of course. That's life. There were problems in every place in which I've lived and I felt all the things in every place I've lived--and will until I take my last breath. That's being human. Problems are almost always caused by people (including myself) and there are people everywhere. Long before we knew we were moving here, but during the time when it was a long-tern goal, people would ask me if I really thought it would be any different here than in the US. I said I was sure it would be. Once I moved here, people have commented that they sometimes think about moving but, 'since it's the same everywhere, there's no point.' I always reply to this kind of comment that it's not perfect here or anywhere, but it's better than the country I come from--at least for me. And that's the thing--we are all different and different places will suit different people in better and worse ways. I never was and was never going to be comfortable in the US for many reasons. I always felt misplaced. I'm always going to be an outsider here, too, but I am more comfortable. It's easier to live my simple life based on my own set of ethics here than it was there. It's fascinating to live in a country that's only a century old and that has the opposite founding myths to the US. The US myths are about exceptionalism and greatness. There are many problems with this, of course, not least because these blind people right the way across the political spectrum to the fact that the country is susceptible to the same kinds of movements and dangers as other countries. I used to be amazed at how people would genuinely think that certain sorts of political ideology could not possibly happen there because the country is somehow so special as to be immune. This fed into my understanding that leaving was a good idea, since it was glaringly obvious where things were going--and probably without the amount of resistance necessary to slow or halt the progress of such ideas. I think people are grappling with these issues now and it has been traumatic for many who believed their country was somehow something other than what it is. On the other hand, this was a colonized country until a century ago (and some would say that the colonization continues as long as the 6 counties of Northern Ireland remain a part of the UK). The history is close by. There are no delusions of grandeur here, although as things go in certain ways in the UK on one side and the US on another, you can see a bit of smugness start to show itself, which is fascinating. People are people. And yet, it is remarkable how much progress has been made in a short period of time--when Bill and I got married, divorce and birth control were illegal here. When we moved here, Bill voted in the election to legalize marriage equality. This was the first nation to do this by popular vote--and it was not even close. There is no far right political party here like Republicans in the US (the word 'republican' has a different meaning here in any case). There are some scattered hateful people who are trying to organize more with the help of social media and they sometimes pop up, but pushback is swift. And there is more willingness to look at the atrocities committed in the name of the church (which was the main driver of these things here) and to take ownership of them as a society, reminding people that the mistreatment of women and children was something that individuals/society participated in at the time and allowed to happen. Very different than current attempts to pretend that the US was not built on genocide and slavery. Here again, it's not perfect, just better. There is racism here as well as lingering religious division, which often is the veneer for other sorts of divisions. It's entirely likely that a person of colour would not see much difference between the racism here and that in the US and elsewhere, but my white privilege shields me from that kind of experience. I am aware that my experience as an immigrant is hugely different than that of others, partly because I am the spouse of a citizen, partly because of my skin colour, and partly because of where I come from. Will Ireland eventually go the way of other countries and have a large far-right extremist segment of the population and political party or two? Almost certainly. People are people. History cycles. Just as the US will cycle out of the current situation, Ireland will probably cycle back into some nasty stuff, although it'll look different than the old days. But I was there and am here at particular moments in the cycle. I could see where things were heading in the US and knew it was best to leave. It happened that where we landed is in a much different part of their cycle. We went from a country moving backwards to one moving forward, which has been a fascinating experience.

No matter how long I live here, I will never be Irish. It always used to make me laugh when, just after the 2016 US election, people would ask us where we're from and when we would tell them their face would fall and they would look sympathetically at us before saying, 'Well you're European now, so you're OK.' I'm not European, either. I know that to some degree, I will always be uncomfortably United Statesian, simply because that's where I was born and enculturated. But I also know that I never felt like I belonged there, either. I was enculturated there, but always was a little apart--always observing, analyzing, and figuring out what on earth was going on while understanding that the whole 'American dream,' suburban, upper middle class lifestyle I was supposed to be so grateful for just seemed weird and often baffling. I get it from an intellectual perspective, but I was always at a remove. I guess that's just easier and more comfortable for me here where I am in the proper role at last. I AM an outsider in every way and will be for as long as I'm here. And yet, societal infrastructure and attitudes are closer to my own ideas here than there. They recognize large issues here in a way that wasn't the case among people I knew in the US. The foundational understandings are different and more realistic here as are their attitudes towards themselves. They're not as insulated as people in the US, where the idea that they are the centre of the universe is sort of assumed. So for those reasons and more, I don't regret coming here and I'm grateful to have been able to do so. Who knows what will happen in the future. What I do know is that this experience of living in a different way--even though on the surface it doesn't look that different--has broadened and deepened my understanding of things both outside and inside myself, given me much to think about and consider, and made me a better person than I would have been without this experience. 

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