Comment by dxs

I'm a US citizen, have been living in Cuenca, Ecuador for almost all of the last 12 years. I was last in the US June-August 2024, intending to do some backpacking in my old haunts in Washington state, plus a bit of sightseeing.

Too hot, for one thing, even in western WA, home of wet, gray winters and (formerly) gorgeous mild summers. Now you can't even go for a hike without registering on recreation.gov, and then also having to drive possibly hundreds of miles out of your way to show up in-person at a national park headquarters anyway. For what, I don't know -- maybe to be fingerprinted. Roads and trails have also seriously deteriorated since I lived there. Infrastructure maintenance seems to be regarded as an unaffordable luxury these days, something to be needed only by freeloaders, never the rich overlords.

The US also felt really creepy, even compared to my last visit in late 2019. These days, in Ecuador, I'm used to going everywhere on foot and dealing with people in a low-key, individual, informal way, but being in the US is more and more like finding oneself in a bad dystopian science-fiction movie.

People there are isolated from one another, it's all about driving around or standing in long lines for self-checkout at stores, or getting into a confrontation with store policy when just trying to (as a 76-year-old) prove that (1) I exist and (2) am really truly old enough to buy beer (via scanning my driver's license for the appropriate data). Yeeps.

The US is now just a crazy, lonely, assembly-line place full of discouragement and homeless people. And I'm not talking about some urban slum -- this is Olympia, WA, which used to be really pleasant.

And guns. If you look, you notice them. Back in 2019 I fended off three aggressive dogs illegally running loose on a suburban trail in advance of a horse-riding couple, then had the guy say he had a gun and had him threaten to kill me for pepper-spraying his dogs, then had him ram his horse into me, then threaten to kill me a second time. Life these days. Nope.

And even I (little old quiet invisible no-criminal-history me) worry about being hassled or even detained coming into the country, just because. I was already questioned around 10 years ago at the Atlanta airport about what I had been doing in Ecuador. None of your business, dipshit.

So, the US was my home country but, ah, no. Not any more. I'm glad to be where I am now, free of that, all of it. I'll probably never go back, definitely never for anything I can just safely read about at a distance, like a tech conference.