Have you ever thought about moving to another country?

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The marchers in the photo are protesting not only the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia but also the killing of four Kent State studentsby the Ohio National Guard the day before, May 4, 1970.

That’s half of twenty-year-old me behind the right arm of the tall, thin fellow in the middle of the photo.

America: Love It or Leave It, directed at the protesters, was a popular bumper sticker. Around this time, my gentle father used those words in a heated argument about Vietnam around our dining room table with my cousin Jim and me. I’m sure Jim and I replied with some equivalent idiocy.

Decades later, some of those Baby Boomer dissidents have decided to do just that in retirement.

Leave America.

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Rebecca and I just returned from a month in San Miguel, Mexico. It was our first visit to this central Mexican city of about 70,000, where 10,000 American and Canadian ex-pats live.

I got to know John, a retired American minister who has lived in San Miguel with his wife for about ten years. They’ve built a house and settled in. I asked him why he decided to leave the USA.

We love the kindness and sweetness of the Mexican people. That has become more important as we age. They are reverential of their elders, in contrast to the United States.

And then he said

The anger in the U.S. is a relatively new issue. But it pushed us to move here sooner than we might otherwise. Our trips back to D.C. were increasingly depressing as we dealt with angry people in the grocery store, angry drivers, people walking in the neighborhood who didn’t greet us, etc.

Another couple, gregarious Herb and Adrienne, would talk about anything but American politics. Too painful, Adrienne said, and also one reason why they spend more time outside the USA every year.

Opinion polls tell us that 15% of Americans want to leave America. Google search interest in moving to Canada spiked in 2016 when Donald Trump won, in 2020 with the Biden victory, and in June 2022 when Roe vs. Wade was overturned (source).

Of course, even those who say they want to leave won’t. And those who do, like John and his wife, leave for more than one reason.

This has gotten this aging Boomer thinking about that ancient epithet:

America: Love It Or Leave It

I’ve asked myself three questions: What is America? What does it mean to love America? What should I do if America has changed so much that I can no longer love it?

My answers are likely different from your answers. Please share yours in the comments.

What is America?

The “We” in We the People is more inclusive than 1949, my birth year. That’s what I love about my country. Not the number of people but the plurality of voices once silenced, now heard.

Yet America is complicated.

What is America?

It spans July 4th to John Calhoun and Frederick Douglass; the Trail of Tears and Deb Haaland; The Wicked War and The Civil War; Jim Crow and Rosa Parks; Jewish Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 1959 and Jewish Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 1993; Kate Smith’s God Bless America and Marvin Gaye’s Star Spangled Banner; the riots after the George Floyd murder, the assault on the American Capital on January 6th, and the peaceful protests that accompanied both; exceptionally violent and exceptionally humanitarian; incredibly welcoming and extraordinarily inhospitable.

In 1970, my father and I were attached to different parts of America. I loved Dylan’s Times They Are a-Changin America with this brutal message to parents.

Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand

My father’s America was traditional, white, male, and Protestant.

Both his America and my America WERE America in 1970.

Both Barack Obama’s America and Donald Trump’s America ARE America today. Each represents a different vision of America.

When I watched this scene on January 6, 2021, I found myself shouting at the TV.

Love it or leave it, you bastards.

What does it mean to love America?

I have a family member I love but sometimes don’t like very much. He does things so differently from how I would do things. It’s like we live in different worlds.

Occasionally, I can withdraw into my little world and become a bit sullen. I hate this part of me. It’s marbled inside me with everything else.

Does the unlovable part of my kin cause me not to love him?

What about those parts of me I’d like to gouge out? Do they cancel all the good bits?

Both my relative and I are dense with good and evil.

Complicated.

With its 330 million people and 405-year history, going back to the arrival of 20 captive enslaved people in 1619, America is marbled with good and evil.

The late political scientist E.E. Schattschneider* puts it this way.

Democracy begins with an act of imagination about people. Not people as abstractions but the warm, breathing, feeling, hindering, loving, hating, aspiring, living beings with whom we identify ourselves.

The democratic concern for people is not selective…it takes a lot of indiscriminate affection for people as a people to run a democracy.

Indiscriminate affection is an excellent way to describe my love of kin, self, and country.

Even the Oath Keepers.

But love can’t be blind. And it has limits.

Should I leave America?

I was on sabbatical teaching in Poland when George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004. I recall thinking that I did not want to return to a country led by George W., Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. I felt estranged from my country.

I’ve thought about withdrawing completely from my relative. When I’m in a funk, I feel alienated from myself.

If Donald Trump wins in 2024, will my indiscriminate affection for his millions of supporters go out the window?

My home state of Iowa has become a meaner place for immigrants, the poor, and the LGBTQ community.

It would be like the sullen part of me taking over my life.

Will I follow John, Adrienne, and Herb out the door?

It’s not easy to leave one’s country, even for those in danger.

When asked why he came back to Russia, the late Aleksei A. Navalny ** said

I don’t want to give up either my country or my beliefs. I cannot betray either the first or the second. If your beliefs are worth something, you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.

I’m not yet ready to say no to living in America. Even though John, Adrienne, and Herb now live in Mexico, their voices and votes are still heard in America. They haven’t given up on their country.

But nothing beats bodies marching or, in this case, standing up.

Those standing with signs are protesting a decision by the Winnishiek County Board of Supervisors to cut a roadside management program as an alternative to herbicides.

That’s half of 73-year-old me in the red hat behind the right arm of the woman reading the petition.

Some things never change.

Unless we march.

And stand.

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*From Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government

**From With Prison Certain and Death Likely, why did Navalny Return, Neil MacFarquhar, Washington Post, February 17, 2024.