From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Sep 17 2002 - 13:13:42 MDT
>Brian D Williams
> >If this is all you do it's nothing more than a token gesture.
Well. I was mostly talking to Samantha, and I felt that you aggressively
broad-sided me. I found your message very difficult because the plain
fact is I miss my family and friends every day. And I have very good
reasons to think that living here is a more suitable life for me.
You were way off-base with what you wrote.
Believe it or not, there _do_ exist people with U.S passports who
don't feel attachments to the U.S. government and/or U.S. culture(s).
I never did. I have links to wildly different places. I'm a child of a
Latvian refugee, born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, I spent 24 years
in southern and northern Calif and four years in Wisconsin, two years
in Colorado, almost five years in Germany and soon I'm moving to
Italy. I'm half Latvian, 1/4 German and 1/4 Greek. Living in the U.S.
was usually annoying to me because the world outside of the U.S.
borders was usually treated as irrelevant, and (of course) it's not.
I looked for a way to live outside of the U.S. for a time, and I found
it easily through my PhD advisor: I asked him if I could be his
student, and he said yes. His group have been the best astronomy
working environment I've had in twenty years. My decision to move to
Europe was aided and then hindered by a love affair that crashed and
burned when I arrived in Germany and hindered more with a huge money
debt that I had planned to postpone for several years and found that I
couldn't. Four long years and several jobs later, I earned my PhD,
paid off my debt, and lived in a society where I'm a half-deaf-mute,
but somehow I adjusted, thrived at times, sunk at other times, and I
managed to see and experience more of the world.
Last year when I finished my degree, my family, colleagues, friends,
(and I) thought I would return to the U.S., and I discovered that the
idea didn't appeal to me very much. In the last five years, either I
have changed or the U.S. has changed, or both. So I sought ways to
stay in Europe, and several things appeared, almost magically, giving
me possibilities to set my roots outside of the U.S. for a very long
time. I still miss some things about the U.S. (my family, friends,
ziplock bags, Jif peanut butter, Sunday newspapers), but I miss things
about other countries when I am away from them, too.
It doesn't make sense for humans to attach oneself to a stamp in a
passport (nor do I think it is very healthy), if human's vision is
much much broader. I know many areas where that the rest of the world
can learn from the folks in the U.S. and I know just as many areas
where the folks in the U.S. can learn from many in the rest of the
world. I really wish that I could persuade or convince some Americans
that the world outside the borders is indeed relevant and in fact very
necessary for the growth of our species. But I can't. The interest
must be there. So for now, I take care of my own universe and hope.
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
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