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Rising Star
things like police brutality and systemic racism and testilying and all that were always troubling to me, but not in a way that made me unable to go about my daily life. Even the disturbing video of the murder of George Floyd, or the disruptions caused by protests, or the disruptions to my daily life caused by both protests and looting, were not stopping me from working.
But when the police became a speech suppression force tasked with unloading on the people who dared to protest their own brutality, while the president used the military to tear gas protestors for an obscene photo op, I stopped feeling like I live in a flawed democracy with serious racism issues, and started feeling like I live in a post-democratic police state.
it's making me think of maybe getting tfo this country. and that thought is distracting me from drafting legal documents. which is not a good place to be in when now more than ever is the time to want to maximize my revenue generation.
Rising Star
yeah I'm still not over this. Ugh. Anyone know what the Canadian lateral market is like? I feel like a number of possibilities in November could induce a decision to gtfo. but damned if I wouldn't miss my firm, or not having to take a foreign bar exam.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out. By the way, why not move to non majority white country? Sounds kind of racist that your first choice is another white country. Check your privilege.
Rising Star
You are not a serious person and not a smart one, but I don't mind explaining why Canada. Oddly enough the melanin distribution of the population wasn't a factor I felt the need to consider, and it's curious that that's something you think should be given a lot of thought.
The unsurprising answers are family connections, fluency in the primary language, proximity to America where other family remains, general high standards of living, and a pretty healthy political culture. Overall a much nicer environment to bring up children, but uprooting sucks generally, and is particularly hard with a professional background that tends toward narrow, provincial expertise (pun retroactively intended). Also cold weather sucks. Not sure it's worse than a police state, but it's pretty off-putting.
So you're another white lib complaining about racism but moving to another white country. Got it.
Rising Star
neither America nor Canada is a "white country," as much as people of your political persuasion would like it to be so. But one of those places is the one that gave refuge to human beings escaping the police forces formed to capture them for slavery in the other... and has continued to make more convincing efforts to address racism ever since. But as I said, the presence of systemic racism in America was not a new development and the events of the last two weeks didn't teach me anything new about it.
What I did learn more about was the precariousness of our relationship to government and its enforcers. It has been easy to think of NYC as an oasis of sanity in a country gone mad, chalking up the nation's embrace of fascism lite to the structural flaws inherent in our electoral system and the minority rule it has enabled. But when the chips were down, New York was just another city where supposed public servants, delegated by its citizenry a sacred trust granting them a monopoly on legitimate use of coercive violence, turned out to be closer to an occupying force engaging in (mediocre) counterinsurgency against a population protesting their own abuses. Questioning their authority had to be met with arbitrary and excessive displays of force, threats, and actual assaults. And the rest of us, having accepted the exceptional, public health-based rationale for stay at home orders, were also expected to accept a universal house arrest issued in connection with first amendment activities.
I wasn't shocked to see the president deploying national guardsmen to suppress protest for a mere photo op; evidently I'm not naive enough to be the top military brass that managed to be ambushed by such predictable behavior.
But New York was supposed to be different. This isn't Trump's city. And yet, apparently, the same political norms are just as weak here. Land of the free? Where?