Leaving America

Why did I leave? What was I looking for? How did I get the courage to give up all I knew for a place I had barely seen? Was it the desire to flee the division, turmoil, and seething anger—the racism, ageism, mass murders, and gun violence? Was it a need to escape the trauma of the Christian Nationalists and right-wing politicians imposing upon us their unconstitutional laws and medieval beliefs? Was it the will to be freer than America said I had a right to be?

Was it braver to stay or braver to go? Often, going away is one of the most aggressive things a person can do. When the means of expressing disagreement are limited or increasingly stressful, as in my case, leaving is one of the few ways to exert pressure. 

I, for one, am too tired and old to be an activist and reformer any longer. My best years were spent as a leader and herald for a religious movement that I now realize was a traumatic cult. T***p has exposed the hypocrisy in the Evangelical and Christian dogma and has shown them for who they are.  Was it the white supremacists, bigots, redneck militant MAGA trucks, or was it perhaps my most significant shock, the corruption of the Supreme Court? 

Or was it to experience new lands, customs, and culture? Was it to embrace a new, less prudish lifestyle? Was it for the thrill of adventure? Was it for the exquisite treasure of anonymity? Was it for the food, wine, architecture, art, and people?

In many ways, I am not unlike anyone who has dreamed of crossing the Atlantic and living surrounded by historic castles and old towns in Europe. 

The actual narrative embraces the answers to all these questions and more. It portrays the phenomenon of migrants moving along different currents of the world to find a better place since time immemorial. I must admit to the shock to my system when an attorney asked if we wanted his help with our immigration to Spain. I had never considered the possibility of one day being an immigrant. That designation, that label that has been so maligned the world over. 

I have not encountered many Americans on this journey; my anonymity is a metaphor for the isolating and challenging nature of the migration itself. However, I believe my actions are both universal and distinctly American—American in the sense of the great ideal of a country that has yet to be realized.

My migration responded to political and social upheaval, not of my making. I did what humans have done for centuries when life becomes untenable—what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the Palestinians are doing as the Israelis commit genocide.

What binds our stories together is the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where we were. I did what human beings looking for freedom have often done throughout history. I left.

How do I adequately explain my departure? I’ve lived too many lives, done too much, known too many people, and ridden so high and so low that there’s no point in fooling myself into thinking I can capture the whole of it. But here is a small part. 

I’ve always been a black sheep

My dad tried to teach me how to repair machines in the yarn factory he managed. Each time, I obediently bent over the complex machinery and tried my best to fix it, but I could never get the hang of it, nor, truth be told, really wanted to. One time, after hours of tedious, backbreaking work, the machine broke with a loud bang six times in a row, and production halted to nothing. 

This frustration proved to me, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, that I wasn’t cut out for this line of work. My mother pleaded to my dad, “Let him go. Unloose him. Unloose him.” He reluctantly consented, and I finally got away. 

I was the first person in our family to graduate high school, get a college degree, move away from home, work for a salary, earn my fortune, travel the world, invest in stocks, question my upbringing, retire early, and renounce religion. So, it figures that this black sheep would be the first to move to Europe. My research says that the Elrod family descended from Johan Deter Elrod, who immigrated to America from Germany or Austria in 1709. As far as I know, I am the first to immigrate back to Europe. 

I’ve always had wanderlust

Literature transported me, a child trapped in the poverty of the Appalachians, to magical and faraway places where the Greek and Roman gods reigned. King Arthur jousted, Blackbeard marauded, Marco Polo explored, Napoleon fought, Custer fell, Hemingway wrote (and drank), and Don Quixote roamed. 

In a miraculous twist of fate, I journeyed to all those exotic lands in real life. My childhood writers helped foreshadow the places with vivid detail, and the subsequent visits felt like déjà vu, or synchronicity, as Jung calls it. The authors’ layered symbolism made the Acropolis, the Forum, the Silk Road, the Round Table, Treasure Island, Les Invalides, Little Bighorn, Murchison Falls, and the Ciutat Vella seem familiar places. 

In retirement, after reading Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind and Cervantes’ Don Quixote and hearing Gina lovingly describe her times in Spain, we viscerally began to feel the seductive pull of Barcelona. After two trips there, the tranquility of European and Spanish lifestyles enchanted us, and America, with its chaos, could not compare. 

I’ve always been driven by my senses

Since I left the poverty of my provincial Tennessee home at age twenty-four for the affluent and sophisticated lifestyle of Palm Beach, I have not shied away from unfamiliar territory. I deeply desire to know and learn new things and discover different cultures and ways of life. 

One of my life mantras is to broaden my perceptual view. Perceptual view refers to our sensory experience of the world. We use our senses to become aware of objects, relationships, and events. Through this experience, we gain information about the environment around us.

Prior experiences shape our perceptions, interests, and how we process information. This can cause one person to perceive a situation differently than another. Perception can also be affected by our personality. For instance, research has found that personality traits, such as openness and conscientiousness, can impact our perception of societal justice. 

Conversely, our perceptions can also affect our personality. For example, when I perceive that my country is chaotic, I show unhealthy traits related to frustration and stress. I exhibit healthy characteristics if I sense my country as serene and relaxed. For highly sensitive people (HSP) like me, this heightens the conflict between tension and relaxation exponentially. And while many people can manage the chaos surrounding them and block it out, I cannot.

I wanted to stay in America. I don’t have friends or family in Spain, nor do I know much about the lifestyle. But I realized that I  had much in common with the movements of refugees from unhealthy events, where oppressed people go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans, or as far as it takes to reach a new land with the hope that life will be better and healthier.

I’ve always yearned for freedom

After almost fifty years trapped in a religious cult, it terrifies me to see those same Christian Nationalists taking over our politics, courts, and schools. Book bannings, rewriting history, taking away the right for a woman to choose what to do with her own body, white supremacy, gun violence, daily mass murders, police brutality, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the celebration of intellectual ignorance all are hallmarks of my traumatic past. 

That is why Kamala’s slogan, “We are not going back,” rings so true. I refuse to return to being a servant to a cause I know is evil—one that seeks to deny liberty to humans who look and believe differently. Freedom is the spiritual essential of my being. And that loss of freedom prompted me to leave America, a land I was taught to believe is the home of the free. But that lyric is surrounded by militant and religious overtones that no longer ring true.

My losses and renunciations—of home, my country, my friends, my beloved children, and my faith—are heartbreaking from the beginning to the middle of life. But my gains and embracements—of a new home, country, friends, adopted children, and humanism—are joyful in my second half of life. 

In Conclusion

Two award-winning books I just finished have shed new light on my distorted view of America—the perception the propaganda of government, education, religion, and family gave me. They are The Passage of Power (Caro) and The Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson). They chronicle the rampant racism, misogyny, misanthropy, and corruption that has permeated America since its inception. It’s no wonder the Republican Party and authoritarians like DeSantis want to rewrite history and ban books that recount it truthfully. 

In a recent commencement speech, Bono of the band U2 said,

“As an Irishman, I’ve always believed that America is not just a country, it’s an idea, it’s a dream that belongs to the whole world. Now, I know that, in recent times, the world has been reminded that America is an idea that doesn’t even belong to many Americans. And for many Black Americans, Lady Liberty’s torch is far from a beacon of hope. It’s often a flashlight in the face. America is a dream—of where we might be. We now know that America is a song yet to be written. That America might be the greatest song the world has never heard. It’s a wild thought, that America is yet to exist.”

Perhaps if the dream of America and liberty and justice for all comes into existence in my lifetime—I will return. But until then, to paraphrase my favorite quote by a Spaniard, “Goodbye, my name is Randito Elrodo, you killed my country, hasta nunca.”

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