that you have to decide what's best for yourself and to hell with the validation. When the repukes start herding certain "undesirables" into ghettos is when I'm outta here. I won't be waiting for repukes to be loading the "undesirables" into cattle cars and then waiting for those people to disappear. It hasn't gotten to that point though, and I'm going to do my part to make sure it won't.

When I graduated college in the '70s, I decided that moving away from my city roots was the best idea as I did not feel safe there. I was concerned about the warmongering (this was the end of Vietnam War), nukes, pollution, and I just wanted a quiet place with some earth under my feet. So I moved to Oregon and learned how to grow a garden, take care of chickens and so on. Meanwhile, the guy next door was swooping down on his farm fields spraying pesticides and the US gov was permitting the clearcutting of our virgin northwest national forests for a song. The trees were sold to the Japanese for almost nothing.

I lived on farms through the seventies and eighties. The last farm home I moved to, which I liked a lot and still do, was in a beautiful New England small town surrounded by farms. In the past 20 yrs., though, suburbia has moved in. Through all this time I have been very active in open space preservation but people are very dumb and short-sighted sometimes, especially in a town like mine, run by repuglicans. They are destroying the land and water but I am still fighting the development whores and ignorance. It is very disheartening at times.

I sometimes think I could do more by going to DC helping to help bring down BushCo rather than doing what I do here. I'm in the autumn of life where I think, if I help save the nation and younger generation and I get killed in the process it will be fine. Another part of me wants to retire to some quiet place (only quiet ones left are quite cold or buggy, IMO).

Bottom line is, you've got to figure it out on your own. Don't think that Canada or anywhere else is paradise, though. I lived in Canada for 5 yrs. and there are problems there, too (one of which is, it's damn cold!). I've been on one of the remotest Caribbean beaches in the world and it was littered with tons of plastic. Do what you can to make and leave the world better, wherever you go. To me, that's the bottom line.