The end of January marked my one year anniversary blogging. I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that blogging would be the main event of my sixties. When my publisher first suggested it, I thought blogging was something only young people did. That a blog was a public diary that announced to the world what you had for breakfast and what movies and bands you liked. I also had no idea that blogging would lead to on-line relationships with other bloggers of all ages – some even older than I was.

While I still struggle to think of anything earth shattering to blog about, I am coming to recognize the unique perspective I enjoy as one of seven million Americans living overseas. I have recently begun a new book, a collection of essays, about my new life in New Zealand and how it affects my view of my native country. The following is from the introduction, which attempts to describe the mindset that led to my decision to emigrate.

Vietnam, Watergate and My First Attempt to Emigrate

When I finally left the US in October 2002, I had been thinking of emigrating for many years. I had even made a prior attempt to live overseas. In June 1973, I shipped all my belongings to England, intending to start a new life there. Many Americans of my generation left the US in the early seventies, for Canada, Europe and more remote parts of the world. Most were draft-age men afraid of being sent to Vietnam. A few were women involved in illegal abortion clinics that sprang up before the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision officially legalized pregnancy termination. Many were artists and intellectuals like me, disillusioned by the extreme political corruption that was exposed by the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post coverage of Watergate, CIA domestic spying and Nixon’s apparent use of US intelligence for his own political purposes.

In 1973, I myself was totally apolitical, and my decision to leave the US had very little to do with Vietnam or Watergate. My disillusionment stemmed more from watching rampant consumerism overtake the humanist values I had grown up with – the strong family ties, deep friendships and involvement in neighborhood and community life that were so important to my parents’ and grandparents’ generation.

During my eighteen month stay in England, it was deeply gratifying to meet people in London and Birmingham who could care less about owning “stuff” they saw advertised on TV. People who still placed much higher value on extended family, close friendships and the sense of belonging they derived from their local pub, their church or union, or neighborhood sports clubs, hobby groups, and community halls – which had all virtually disappeared in the US.

The Murder that Turned My Life Upside Down

A downturn in the British economy in late 1974 forced me to return to the US to complete my psychiatric training. While I never abandoned my dream of living overseas, my time in Europe had politicized me. I still scanned still scanned the back pages of medical journals for foreign psychiatric vacancies. However in my spare time, I also joined grassroots community organizations seeking to improve political and social conditions in the US.

For many years, believing Nixon was an aberration, I was naively optimistic about the ability of community organizing to thwart the corrupting influence of powerful corporations over federal, state and local government. It never occurred to me the institutions of power themselves were deeply corrupt and had been for many years.

1987 protest

As I in write in The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee, the truth came crashing down on me in 1987, when I became part of a movement to create a Seattle African American museum. Owing to my financial and social standing as a physician, this struck a raw nerve somewhere in the power elite. Suddenly I was barraged with prank and threatening calls at all hours of the day and night, while unsavory looking strangers stalked me and tried to run me down with their vehicles.

Despite the extreme turmoil this systematic harassment and intimidation caused my family, it was the 1989 murder of one of my patients, an African American postal worker and union activist, that turned my world upside down. The brutal murder – the autopsy photos revealing that Oscar was beaten before he was thrown from the fifth floor of the Seattle YMCA – was upsetting enough. However the event that opened my eyes to the total depravity of the American political system was the seizure of the police evidence file – essentially shutting down the homicide investigation – by a little known branch of US intelligence known as the Postal Inspectors.

To be continued