If you had to leave the USA, where would you live? This sounds exactly like the kind of question a Snappy One would ask: sharp, concise, and, sadly, relevant right now.
Like our friend the slug, who is either secreting for sex or for movement. As you can see in the first photo, he’s a Scottish mollusk with a brogue this ignorant American couldn’t decipher.
Here’s another Caledonian with a definite opinion about the USA and its citizens who wander abroad.
As Rebecca and I walked past, looking for cover from the rain and minding our own business, she shouted out, startling us with the vehemence of her question: “How could you elect that man a second time!”
“How did you know?” we asked.
“Your heads were down, ashamed, I suppose, so I assumed you were from the States.”
Almost everyone we met on our two-week sojourn through this highly literate country seemed to have a definite opinion about “the corner [Americans] have painted themselves into,” as Bob Dylan mournfully sang in Mississippi.
And you do tend to take seriously people who’ve turned churches and train stations into bookstores.
Still, a few had better things to do than pay attention to foreigners. They did, however, remind me to eat more fiber.
To elaborate on some people’s feelings, a feisty local couple explained over Bobby Burns’ late one afternoon that every country has its dark clouds.
“But no nation in our memory,” said grey-haired Margaret, “has ever attempted suicide a second time after surviving the first try.”
“That’s why we’re staying put in our red state,” Rebecca and I offered in unison. “No one thought it would be this bad.”
Even to us, this sounded weak. In a healthy country, it would not have happened the first time, let alone the second.
As we left the pub, we told our new friends, “We hope something better is coming.”
We added that many of our neighbors in northeast Iowa are working hard for Democratic Party candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, and that gives us more than hope. We want to be part of this movement to take our country back, to help heal it.
Our Scottish slug friend, who I began the story with, helps clean up the environment by eating rotten matter. Like millions of others, we’re doing something similar in the USA starting today, Snappy One, by voting.
