Where am I?

I am in Montevideo, Uruguay. My family has mostly moved here.

We retain a US residence, in the most economical way I could arrange. To the degree it remains safe to do so, I hope we travel back to see family frequently.

But my kid will attend school in Montevideo, not in the US.

Yes, we have emigrated in response to the election of Donald Trump. We lived the last few years in suburban Pinellas County, Florida. We were very unhappy there. But prior to November 2024, we were gathering ourselves to move to a mid-size US city where a transit-centered urban life might be affordable. We were thinking about Pittsburgh and, um, Minneapolis, even though my wife and I both detest cold. In the US, we enjoyed living in San Francisco, but 400-ish square feet had become intolerable, and even that is less affordable now for us than it had been when we moved.

Leaving the country was a decision based on information flows much slower than the news cycle. While we were packing up our lives in December, I was more optimistic about the direction of the US than I had been since inauguration. But we were already committed to the move, had been by May, with advances paid to lawyers and a private school where the kid will be taught in English. (We figure he'll pick up Spanish quickly, but he's worked very hard in school, we didn't want to overthrow his academic successes by throwing him into the deep-end of education in a foreign language.)

Was this the right thing to do? I have no idea. You can see some of my thinking coming together in this piece from February.

I feel like a coward. I am relatively privileged as an American — economically, racially. My family is far from the top of the list of people under threat. But then events in Minneapolis are a reminder of how quickly the Niemoller poem can be run through.

Putting aside my own welfare, and my family's, is this the right thing to do, ethically? I don't know. I do feel I have an obligation to do my part, to fight for the United States. I am an American, and always will be. I remain tremendously proud of what the American experiment meant and still means in aspiration. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Government of the people, by the people, for the people.

Of course I am, we all should be, ashamed of how short the American reality has often fallen from those aspirations. Of how short the United States is falling now.

But the American project remains, in my view, a miracle in world history, and though it is wobbling — drunkenly, dangerously — we can and should and must save it.

My tiny contribution to human affairs comes through words. I mean to continue to write them. I will continue to have lots to say about how, in my view, the American experiment can be reformed, refounded, rise again from the pile of toxic ashes it has become.

I don't write much about my personal life here. That's not what this blog is for. But there are questions of standing, so you should know. Perhaps my cowardly flight means I have no standing to offer advice to the United States. That, dear reader, is for you to judge.

I will, nevertheless, do my best. If you are ever in Montevideo, please let me know.