Leaving Home

(Originally appeared in The Progressive Populist)

There were two polls released recently that were both depressing, if not altogether surprising.

The first, released in January, by Ranger Research Associates and Ipsos, found that only 27 percent of those polled agreed with the statement “if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.” That figure represents a 50 percent drop from 2010, when the question was first asked by the two polling organizations. Even darker, the poll indicated that 18 percent of those questioned said the American dream, its ethos of opportunity and success and a better life never was true, which was up four percent from those asked the same question in 2010.

To paraphrase Joan Didion, it isn’t just the center that won’t hold — the sepia-tinged America is no longer in focus.

The second, put out in March by Monmouth University, indicated that 34 percent of Americans would like to go settle in another country if they were free to do so. In 1950, that number was five percent. In the mid-1970s, it was between nine and 12 percent.

Worst of all, it is the young who make up 50 percent of those who would leave if the circumstances presented themselves.

I’m not young.

Which brings me specifically to a recent trip to Portugal I took with my family, and generally to trips to Europe over the past decade. We’ve been to Iceland, my wife and I, as well as to Norway and France, before this trip. My daughter and I were in Germany and Poland a few years back.

Vacations are a bad time to think about relocating — even when, as my daughter and I were, you’re on a bus in the snow on the border between Germany and Poland and the bus is stopped for an hour while authorities check for drugs — and about how much better one’s life would or might be in a foreign country.  I have been going to the Bahamas every year for the past 30. I love it there. But what I love is where I stay and work as a comedian, the Atlantis Hotel and Casino in the Bahamas. The American Embassy in that country cautions travelers that “murders have occurred at all hours, including in broad daylight on the streets,” so I always remind myself that sitting in the marina eating an overpriced pizza is not a true depiction of life there.

This, too, was how I felt when visiting Oslo and Reykjavík in spring — or Lisbon and Porto last month. It’s as if these cities and countries put on their Sunday best. (I’m sure America does the same for Europeans when they visit Yellowstone, Wrigley Field, or Greenwich Village.) And, not to put too fine a point on this, Europe has its shares of skinheads and bigots — and they’re gaining power. In Britain, more people with far-right views are under investigation by counter-extremist agencies than are those with extreme Islamic ideologies. In Germany, its Interior Ministry considers the biggest threat facing German society to be homegrown extremism. When my daughter and I were in Łódź, a beautiful, vibrant city about 85 miles southwest of Warsaw,  we took a cab to the train station. The driver reminded me of my grandfather, who was born in Łódź in 1903, and left with his family before World War I. 

There were approximately 230,000 Jews who lived in the city at the beginning of World War II.

When the Soviets liberated the place in 1945, there were 877 left.

Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was hellacious; Łódź in 1943 was hell. America’s original sin was slavery. Europe’s? Where do we start?

However . . . however.

I have noticed each time I leave America, I have no great longing to return, no sense that I’m adrift in a foreign land or in any danger. Maybe it’s the absence of the fear of gun violence, the access to universal health care and higher education, the vacation settings, the sense, backed up the World Happiness Report, that people in Europe are generally happier than are Americans. The continent holds eight of the Top 10 positions. (Australia and, surprisingly, Israel round out the top 10.) America comes in at No. 23 overall, and at No. 62 among those under age 30.

Europe’s heterogeneousness is appealing. Morocco is closer to Lisbon than Chicago is to Tulsa.

But would I actually emigrate?

How does one leave the friends who take you to lunch, the family members who know when something’s wrong, the books and films that don’t have to be translated, the grain-elevator museums in Illinois, the size-12 churros that are sometimes available at Subway, and a hundred million other things that remind you of where you are, who you are, and who you were?

When my family and I got home, there were packages on the porch and I needed to go to Reasor’s, our supermarket. Because this is America, unlike Europe, you could buy Diet Coke and yogurt and dog food any time of the day or night.

Familiarity was all around.

Still, when I think of America these days, I wonder if consumerism, a familiar language, and dear friends are enough to keep me here. Loudon Wainwright III wrote in the song “Thanksgiving”: “The sense of something has been lost/There’s no way to replace it.”

P.S. I, in fact, went to Reasor’s and noticed new hours posted on the door — starting the very next day, it would no longer be open 24 hours.