Leave or Stay?

Mark Morford says stay.

I said it, you said it, pretty much anyone with a brain larger than a grape or a soul more nimble than a rock said it maybe a thousand times over.

And you probably weren't even all that drunk when you said it and maybe you were even a little more than half serious and maybe you said it just like this: If Bush somehow snags another election, if the unthinkable comes to pass and the Dubya neocon nightmare refuses to end, well, that's it. I'm outta here.

Done. Over. Gone. Moving away. To Canada. Or France. Latvia. Uranus. Anywhere, really, that doesn't have Bush as leader and that doesn't make me openly ashamed to be a citizen and that doesn't make me feel like a sickened disillusioned ulcerated outcast in my own happily divisive country every damn day including Sunday.

More...

Update 2:30pm:

As reader Ty put it, "As a negro, all i keep thinking about is the negroes in the south who [were] mired in an awful world before the civil rights movement and even after and how they were strong and alone and mostly unsupported at first. how their sacrifice and blood and washing the floors of whites who hated their guts allowed me to do all the shit i do every day, and be in my cushy tax bracket, and laugh and smoke cigars with my negro buppie ivy league friends, and how i owe it to them to fight the assholes in the capitol for every inch they wanna take off that sacrifice

"fight and fight and fight. i owe history and precedent. fight and fight and fight. i owe my grandmother and my grandfather and his father and his mother who was a slave...

"and if one more liberal friend tells me (even jokingly) that he's moving to canada or europe, i'm gonna kick his fucking heart out for my grandfather and grandmother and her mother who was a sharecropper and never had that choice...

"it's on!"

So, if you're planning on leaving, don't be telling this Rude Pundit reader. Just sneak out. I read another comment somewhere (if I find it again, I'll post it) about a young female American artist living in Mexico who is so upset at Bush being re-elected that she is going to move back here to work to reverse things.

Personally, I'm keeping my options open as long as possible before having to make such a drastic decision. I used to think that it would be a terrible thing to do to the soldiers who are being sent to Iraq. Abandon them. But LaBelle says she heard 70% of them voted for George Bush, and I see way too many horrible things that I think any decent human being would risk a court martial to avoid doing, and frankly, individually, they need to examine their consciences and make those choices. This is their opportunity to stand and be counted. They don't need me to rescue them.

Either way. Choose for yourself. There's no right or wrong here.