Why I Self-Deported from the US. Part I: Why Spain?

Why I Self-Deported from the US
Part I:  Why Spain?

            I had been planning for many years to retire to Spain.  It is a country rich in history and culture.  A country of Paleolithic cave paintings, Roman ruins, and Baroque churches.  A country where people value the enjoyment of life over the accumulation of wealth and power.

            Still, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was the impetus for accelerating my retirement plans.  The sheer embarrassment of living in a country that chose this bombastic, narcissistic, buffoon as its leader—not to mention his racist political base or the rest of the Republican party that refuses to consider the many grounds there are to impeach him—was enough for me to start jumping through the long series of hoops the Spanish Consulate puts in the way of non-EU citizens obtaining a residency visa.  The continuing erratic behavior of the US president with his undignified, juvenile tweets has only reconfirmed my decision that now was a good time to abandon my native country.

            But, ultimately, my “love-it-or-leave-it” form of resistance to Trump had less to do with “alternate facts” and the undermining of rational political discourse in the US than it does to the quality of life Spain affords.  And is affordable.  As a recently retired teacher of modest means, I nonetheless have sufficient funds to live quite comfortably in a vibrant, culturally rich urban center; and even though as an American living abroad I cannot use my US Medicare account (into which I had paid many thousands of dollars over the course of my thirty-five years of employment), buying private health insurance in Spain actually costs less than I was spending on my Medicare supplement plan and gives me access to world-class health care without deductibles.

Of course, as an advanced capitalistic economy, Spain faces the same problems of economic inequality and poverty that we see in the US (not to mention Spain’s high unemployment rate and the serious constitutional crisis brought on by the Catalan separatist movement).  The difference is that, like the rest of Europe, Spain has adopted a socialistic attitude in deciding how to prioritize governmental spending.  The European model is based on a utilitarian goal of providing the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people—an inclusive attitude that fosters a sense of communal responsibility virtually nonexistent in the go-it-alone, libertarian US.  To be sure, taxes in Spain—especially on the wealthy—are high, but they serve to provide social services and a social safety-net most Americans would envy if they could overcome their myopic exceptionalism to look at how other advanced societies are organized.   And, to be sure, political divisions between conservatives and liberals are just as sharply drawn in Spain as they are in the US, with the former tending to favor “job-creating” businesses and the latter focusing on social programs; indeed, with its parliamentary system of governance and its multiplicity of political parties, political grid-lock is perhaps more endemic in Spain than it is in the US.  However, the fundamental nature of political debates in the two countries differ; in Spain, even the conservatives accept the premise that the role of government is to provide basic social services to citizens and to protect them from excesses of unfettered capitalism.  Workers’ unions are strong and play an important role in the country’s civic discourses.  In contrast, from a European perspective, the US has a right-wing party (Democrats) and an ultra-right-wing party (Republicans). 

And, again to be sure, there are indeed dangerous right-wing, neo-fascist, parties in Europe, although Spain has been largely spared the sort of virulent anti-immigrant nationalism that has grown so alarmingly in France, Germany, and Austria, and in the former Warsaw-bloc nations.  Still, the chance that these neo-fascist groups might actually seize control of any European nation is, for the time being at least, remote.

Politics aside, there are many other aspects of quotidian life in Spain that foster cosmopolitanism and that make this country a less shrill and divisive place to live than the US has become in recent years.

One of the main factors leading to the equanimity and sense of balance one sees in Spain is the daily encountered reminders of the long stretch of human history against which our current concerns and worries seem trivial and petty.  To walk down the higgledy-piggledy alleyways that form the heart of the Spanish town where I live—narrow streets trod over centuries upon centuries by those who came before us—gives one a greater perspective that our own time on this planet is but a blink of humanity’s eye.

And, lest I seem to be painting too a rosy a picture of the benefits that living in a history-drenched country gives, it should be noted that this longue durée perspective also includes an appreciation of the fact that so many of humanity’s worse atrocities originated in Europe:  racial slavery, colonialism, fascism, the holocaust.  In Spain, this also includes the torture and murders carried out by the Inquisition and the brutalities of the more recent dictatorship of Franco.  In my adoptive city of Oviedo, one can still see bullet holes on buildings surrounding the central square of the Cathedral of San Salvador from fighting during the 1936 siege of Oviedo, when the city was almost totally destroyed in the first year of the Spanish Civil War.  Although the damage inflicted on the Cathedral and elsewhere has largely been restored, these bullet holes have intentionally not been filled in—a reminder of the violence our city has so recently witnessed.

         

            Daily life in Spain also provides a reminder that we live in a global world, one in which many cultures are trying to find a way to co-exist.  Although my adopted city of Oviedo is somewhat off the beaten tourist track, it is not uncommon to hear groups of visitors or immigrants speaking other European or African or Asian languages.  Other, more mundane, evidence of the cosmopolis comes with shopping, where package labels usually are written in several different languages; the IKEA instructions for a mattress we bought was written in thirty-five languages—a good number of which I couldn’t even recognize.

Finally, rather than cite statics about the low cost of university education or the price and quality of health care in Spain (such as the World Health Organization ranking of Spain’s overall health performance system as 7^th best of the 191 nations it surveyed and the US as 37^th), I would just note that in Oviedo—acclaimed as one of the cleanest cities in Europe—a bevy of street-sweeping machines daily prowl up and down the entirely pedestrianized old quarter, cleaning up every stray bit of litter or cigarette butt discarded the night before.    While it is somewhat irksome to hear these ubiquitous cleaners go rumbling by at the crack of dawn on the first of their three daily cleaning runs on my street, I am grateful—not only for the cleanliness but also for the fact that the nation to which I have emigrated spends its resources this way, rather than developing ever more nuclear weapons.

A view out of my window