O Canada

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

Since it looks like Bush is going to be re-elected, it's time to look at the handwriting on the wall. It says that the United States is no place I want to live.

The political system itself and the principles it represnts have a lot to say for them, but what the voters themselves are saying through that system... I find contrary to my own values and to common sense. The arrogant foreign policy disgusts me. The embrace of intolerance frightens me. And the sheer fearful irrationality of the voters astonishes me.

My nation has again chosen a Republican executive, legislature, and judiciary. This time even more so than last. It gave Bush an actual majority (not just a plurality) of the popular vote. Let that sink in a moment; it doesn't usually happen. It has thrown out the Democratic leader in the Senate, and elected a handful of far-right-wing Republicans to replace occasionally moderate Democrats in the South. Kentucky re-elected a Republican who's obviously suffering from dementia. My state (along with 10 others) has voted overwhelmingly to make me constitutionally a second-class citizen without the right to marry. (This issue seems to be a major factor in the right-wing turn-out in the king-maker state of Ohio.) Even my county commission district (representing my supposedly lefty neighborhood) has elected a Republican.

There are bits of good news here and there (Obama beat his token challenger, and a Democrat beat one of the Coors clan in Colorado), but they're not enough. I want out.

I'm too settled in my house and my job to pull up stakes and move, so instead I'm declaring that my home is now part of Canada. Ontario, to be specific (since it's closest). I'll be doing this through VirtualCanadian.org, a just-created web site providing a means for disaffected U.S. citizens to declare themselves Canadians... of a sort.

This will allow me to travel abroad without being abused for my nationality. It will entitle me to health care, though I suppose I'll continue using my Michigan-based insurance, since Windsor's pretty far to go for a check-up, and would take too long to reach in an emergency. I still won't get to marry, but at least I won't be singled out in the constitution.

Getting legal recognition of all this will be impossible, of course. It'll only be true in my head. But at this point I'd rather live in a deluded state of denial, than in the United States of America.