A reader comments on an earlier thread:

I’m American by choice. I came here reluctantly from Canada exactly 25 years ago this August when my husband took a job in tech. Over the years I came to love this country and I’m not ashamed to say I wept when I finally became a citizen. It’s gutting to realize that the country I grew to love so much is now gone. Not just broken, or struggling, or diseased, but truly dead and gone.

When I moved from a crappy rented duplex in the exurbs of Silicon Valley to our family’s first home in a modest Seattle suburb in 1998 I wouldn’t have dreamed of locking the door during the day, or even the car parked in the driveway overnight. One of the first questions neighbors would ask when I met them was which church I attended. Today I live in a much nicer neighborhood in a much nicer house and have had my purse stolen from my desk in the kitchen while I was at home in the basement. We now have security cameras monitoring our home at all times. Homeless people lay on the grass sleeping beside the playground my daughter takes my grandson to. No one asks what church I attend as my friends and neighbors are almost entirely unchurched apart from one Unitarian. I say friends but they’re not really people I can speak openly to about how I feel about most of what occurs in this country today.

Today I spent some time searching for information about how many Americans were left in Afghanistan. I learned that last week the claim was there were as many as 15,000. A few days later the claim was that there was no way to know the exact number and so no number would be provided. One Sunday news article said that a leaked document showed around 3,200 Americans had been evacuated. Today I read that America has evacuated over 60,000 people. It doesn’t say how many, if any, were American. Other articles said that the US would not ensure safe passage to the airport for Americans. Another article described how one American man had attempted to get to the airport with his son but couldn’t even get near enough to show his passport so gave it up as too dangerous. It really does seem like Americans in Afghanistan have been abandoned. Yet no one talks about that. Perhaps now that the Taliban has stated it doesn’t want any more Afghans to leave it will be possible for Americans to get to the airport. Perhaps that will just make the Americans easier targets.

That America is abandoning its own citizens to the mercies of the Taliban while preening about the tens of thousands of Afghans it has evacuated is just appalling and would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s truly disgusting. Public servant used to be a term implying something honorable and laudable. Now it’s just meaningless. Our public servants certainly do not serve us and that has been largely true for quite some time. Now that control of the military has fallen to the successor ideology, the last bastion of service to our country and its citizens is gone. The vast majority of our so called public servants are only really in service to their ideology. Our morality is thoroughly utilitarian now and it is seen as good to step on the faces of your fellow citizens if it means helping the “other” climb up over them. Since being American is a source of shame for our elites as well, why would they concern themselves with American citizens over anyone else?

Today my daughter described an incident that happened as she was leaving a pediatric appointment with her two year old. A man held the door open for her and she said thank you to him, without really seeing who it was. It turned out it was a homeless man who followed her and my grandson for an entire block screaming at her. She told me she was pretty shaken up by it. Of course no one did or said anything to help her, not that it would occur to her that someone should. She just shrugged and said, “what do you expect, it’s Seattle.” She’s right, you do expect that in Seattle. I saw it myself on Sunday because that’s where the aquarium is and I wanted to take my grandsons there on my birthday. Usually we just try to avoid the city as much as possible, but that doesn’t solve anything. Seattle is slowing coming nearer to us, as the homeless move into our neighborhoods and crime steadily increases.

My older daughter came to visit with her son from North Carolina. She left today and when she returns she will have to take her car in to be fixed because at the hotel in Charlotte where she stayed before her flight to Seattle last week, someone stole her catalytic converter during the night. I understand stealing catalytic converters is pretty common now. Her deductible is $1000 because that’s the only way she can afford insurance. During her visit to the West coast, someone stole her diaper bag from the car while she was at a park with her sister. I can empathize because a couple years ago someone smashed the rear window of my car and stole my purse while I walked in a different park with my cousin. It was well hidden, but whoever stole it must have simply watched me hide it. By the time I got back to the car they had already charged $4000 on one of my credit cards. There were probably dozens of witnesses because the park was very crowded that day, but no one said anything to me. No one, police included, looked for the thief, of course, but at least my credit card company reversed the charges. The store, of course, will have raised its prices to cover such losses.

When I went to therapy for anxiety my therapist said I was probably just hard wired to be anxious. Evolutionarily speaking, I would have been the one keeping watch around the fire at night, scanning the darkness for threats. For a few years I have longed to leave, to find a safe harbor somewhere in the world where people are still sane. I didn’t because we have too many ties here. Children and now grandchildren. Other family members who moved to be close to us. So I told myself it wasn’t all that bad and took to reassuring myself that there were still many millions of like minded people out there, in other states. I knew I was a frog in a pot, but thought I would know when to jump out, before the water got too hot. I think I was wrong about that and there may not now be time enough left. Where would we go, anyway?

Many years ago I was what I thought of as “progressive”. Over time, I morphed into a classical liberal and then finally a conservative. Too late. There is nothing left in the America of today to conserve. The ship has sailed away and left us in its wake. The best we can do is tether together some life rafts and try and look out for each other. Until they come looking for us, then, God help us.

I bet there are a lot of Americans who feel similarly, wherever they live. Are you one? Explain in the comments — and don’t forget to say where you live.

UPDATE: The same reader responds in the comments section:

I wrote the comment Rod featured here. Reading through the comments I see some helpful suggestions and a bit of snark. I’d just like to clarify that I am a believing Christian and do go to church. I give loads of money to charity and have volunteered a lot over the years. I can’t run for any kind of public office, though I would love to, because if I were outed as a conservative Christian my husband would face severe difficulties in his very woke work environment, and likely lose his job. My local city government is a joke. They rubber stamp building permits and that’s about it. The population is booming as the quality of life decreases. The public schools are completely woke, and the nearest elementary school celebrates Pride week in June. There is a movement to enforce woke curriculum on private schools, including Christian ones.

It is so broken here it does make me miserable and perhaps some of you are right and I should explore other parts of America before I give up on the entire country. What gives me pause is how I’ve seen places that were solidly working class, sensible and charming be overrun by progressives fleeing their own ruined cities. Those charming little towns become miniature versions of Portland and Seattle before long. First come the micro breweries, drag queen story hour at the library and the precious coffee bars, then come the homelessness and resulting disorder. The property values shoot up, pricing blue collar people out of the market and the developers move in and start building soulless condo complexes. It’s just all so tiresome. I hope it never happens to your hometown.

The fact is that those in the dominant ideological bubble don’t see the problem, or if they do their solutions aren’t based on objective reality, but on their collective subjective worldview. Hence, the homeless issue is just the lack of homes for poor people. Crime is just a result of an insufficient social support system. People are the product of the systems in place and those systems are fundamentally racist, colonial, and patriarchal and thus evil and wrong. No one can ever be at fault for their own behavior except the perpetrators of the system. Since the system was founded long before anyone alive today existed, we must smash it down by punishing those who obviously must benefit from it because they superficially resemble those who founded it long ago. What is completely missing from the successor ideology is any idea of human agency, free will and individuality. It’s totalitarian because it’s totalizing.

Having been on the far left, and having lived in the bubble almost the entire time I have been in this country, I know very well how they think. I know many would despise me if they knew what I believed. I know many would happily ruin my family financially. I know this because I have walked among them, volunteered with them, dined with them, even attended church with them. Someone mentioned that despair is a sin and that’s quite right. Christians are admonished not to fear, not to worry and I fight the impulse to do so. I pray the rosary every day asking God for faith, hope and charity. I think what I was doing in the previous comment was really mourning the loss of the America that I fell in love with. Of course there are many other Americans who also love that America and many places where it still exists in some manner, but it’s not coming back. The ideology will make its way in everywhere, if it hasn’t already, and once it’s in it will dominate, it always does.