When we had a chance to get Landed Immigrant status in Canada in 1979, we moved to Paraguay and with my husband facing a new job, didn’t follow through on it. I kept the paperwork until 2015. 

Living abroad for all those 20 years, it was easy to ignore the insanity in America. The proliferation of my lifetime hobby horse, guns.

The anti-democratic reality that as I read today, on a per capita basis the citizens of low population states like Montana have 43 times more power as high population states like California. And who needs two Dakotas? The quadrennial importance of “swing states” on full view when living in so-called blue states where the presidential candidates never showed up.  

With a solid schooling and a reading of history, I understood why these things happened, but not why they never changed. Why was the racism I was steeped in by my parents, my mother a proud, card-carrying legacy member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who never missed an opportunity to tell me how happy the slaves had been enslaved, poisonously in America’s veins? 

Outside the USA in the late 1990s in Mexico City, I watched Blow Job-gate, listening to my wide range of international friends questioning why this was more than a private problem of the Clintons. When I couldn’t justify it with the thin gruel that President Clinton had lied about the affair, my friends would gently remind me that everyone lies about affairs. I grew to agree with them, to my husband’s angry shock. 

Living in Mexico in 2000, we voted once again as absentee voters, watching the flailing vote count from afar. With our kids home for the holidays, we traveled somewhere in Mexico taking the time to listen to the arguments at the Supreme Court in the case Bush v. Gore.  

Then a former Republican president’s son was selected to be president by the former president’s Republican jurists on the Supreme Court, it was the final nail in the coffin of American democracy. The rumor of Sandra Day O’Connor being upset at a dinner party that Gore might win only added to my unease that the fix was in.  

As the 2000s ran their course, I wanted a door out. With family in the UK, I tried to pressure my husband to agree to follow up on our getting UK passports. He and our family in the UK laughed at me. I remember a walk about Bushy Park with each in turn interrogating and dismissing my concerns. 

Then the doorway of the UK laws changed and the door slammed shut. Looking into Canada once again, without my husband’s support, I gave up which is where I am and we are today. Stuck.  

No one believed Cassandra either.