I became an adult ..."adult" about the same time the second Bush became the president of my nation.

   

My relationship with my country has always been a passionate one. I love her trees, her waters, her animals, her skies, her indigenous peoples...everything. 

 Everything.

  The years following Bush two's fraudulant election, I began to feel ashamed of my country. All the things I loved seemed to be in process of being destroyed. 

  I often had dreams about attacking the president, fighting him. They were re-occuring during that administration.

   My shame deepened and I started to hate being American, I hated that I was born there. 

   The shame began to slowly melt away once Bush was gone, but what I had learned in those years about my country and the people inside it left its mark. I no longer loved it. I no longer wanted it to be my home. 

   On the heels of the great recession, I found a way out. 

   I was happy to be gone. I loved to hate it. I loved to speak about it in ways that revealed my disloyalty, that betrayed my disgust. 

   I never wanted to return. 

   I have now spent most of a decade away.  I gained citizenship in a country I have no love for, just to secure my permanent escape. 

   A couple years ago my mom visited me in my foreign "home". 

   The first night I cried myself to sleep thinking of how long I had lived away from my mother. 

   Eventually, that feeling grew to include more and more of the place that had raised me.  A few weeks ago, watching a documentary that began with sweeping drone video of Yosemite, I cried. 

     I miss my homeland, for the first time in my life. 

   For two years now, a man who makes Bush 2 seem reasonable has been in office, again elected by a small but powerful minority who seem to have the great misfortune to have a lack of both intelligence and empathy. 

   Even so. Home is home. Family is family.  And if my country is falling, I want to be there to love her all the way to the end. 

 I have discovered that I love her waters even if they are being poisoned, I love her lands even if they are burning and flooding. I love her people. Even in the midst of morbid stupidity, of selfish grandeur, of ignorant destruction...I want to be home. 

   I cannot stop wanting her to be good, so I have decided I might as well try to help. 

   I am ready for my exile to end.