Who Stole America

I didn’t just wake up one morning mad at the people who stole my country.

It took a number of years for it to play out.

Everyone I talked to told me to relax. “Just chill,” they cooed. “None of it matters. America is still America. Calm down.”

I listened.

Maybe they were right.

Was I overreacting? I asked myself while in the shower, or stuck in traffic, or strolling along the beach outside my apartment in California…

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I was right.

They were wrong.

They were in denial.

They refused to believe America could stop being the America we knew. We’re all Boomers and Xers, and we all grew up when our country really was great. When she really was the best country in world. No ones wants to believe that country is no longer top dog.

But I saw it differently.

For more than a decade, I’ve been paid to Think Big. Play the “What If” game. Connect dots that others either don’t want to connect or refuse to connect. Some pretend the dots don’t even exist.

But the truth is there, if you want to see it…

To be clear, this dispatch is not a dig at any one political party. Each has failed us. Miserably.

Modern politicians in America are—let me say it as plainly as I can—the lowest form of sewage-treatment-plant pond scum. They don’t care about the country they’re supposed to govern. They care about lining their own pockets with wealth they could never earn in a real job. They care about inane, often stupid-beyond-comprehension soundbites they think will help get them re-elected.

They are the people who stole my country. Our country.

And, so, the country devolves.

Which is why I couldn’t take it anymore.

I had to get out. I left America for Europe.

Too many Americans like to rag on and belittle Europe for all kinds of perceived weaknesses. But the historical reality is that Europe has existed in some form for more than 1,000 years. Tribes and clans and villages and communities and cities and countries spent most of that millennium at war with one another over religion, land, ethnicity, and perceived or real slights.

Some parts of Europe are still at it today. But by and large the continent’s citizens have learned that no one wins ultimately. It’s all just wasted resources. Wasted lives. Wasted money. All in the pursuit of nothing that history cares about.

My fear is that America is headed in the same direction Europe was in runup to the Thirty Years War back in the 1600s. Every corner of Europe was an enemy to someone else. No one won. Everyone lost. Europe was decimated for, ultimately, no reason whatsoever.

That is where America is headed today… because Red and Blue are at each other’s throats.

All my friends are sure to tell me I am wrong. I am overreacting. I am reading a bad set of tea leaves.

Maybe.

But I don’t see anything in America’s future that tells me good times are just around the corner…

I see a lot that tells me it’s only going to get worse as this decade goes on.

So… I left.

And I understand why so many Americans have made that same choice. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 15% of Americans now say they want to permanently leave the US. A survey of Gen Z by Preply.com last October found that nearly 18% of those aged 18 to 26 want out because of America’s political climate.

I get it.

Sad—but it was never like that when I was a kid. Or even when I was a young adult in the 1990s moving into my working career, the equivalent of today’s Gen Zs. America was big and bright and obese with opportunity…

Now, she’s just obese with debt, interest payments she can’t afford, and a political class determined to burn it all down from both ends of the candle.

At this point, all I can really offer anyone is a message to join me overseas. Watching America pull herself apart from abroad will be just as sad, of course. But at least you won’t be in the line of fire.

And you will be living a happier, less costly life.